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“Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“Turning something from an idea
into a reality
can make it seem smaller.
It changes from unearthly to earthly.

The imagination has no limits.
The physical world does.
The work exists in both.”
― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

“Without the spiritual component, the artist works with a crucial disadvantage. The spiritual world provides a sense of wonder and a degree of open-mindedness not always found within the confines of science. The world of reason can be narrow and filled with dead ends, while a spiritual viewpoint is limitless and invites fantastic possibilities. The unseen world is boundless.”
― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

“Think of the universe as an eternal creative unfolding.
Trees blossom.
Cells replicate.
Rivers forge new tributaries.
The world pulses with productive energy, and everything that exists on this planet is driven by that energy.
Every manifestation of this unfolding is doing its own work on behalf of the universe, each in its own way, true to its own creative impulse.”
― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

“Despite everything I've been through, I still think that my loneliness is part of some character-building prologue to the joy of togetherness that inevitably awaits me,' she said. 'Isn't that funny?”
― Esther Yi, Y/N

“I wish I were made of glass,” I said. “Then you could see right into me. I wouldn’t have to say a word to make you understand what I’m feeling.”

“It’s more likely that I would see right through you,” O said. “Which means I wouldn’t see you at all. I’d forget you’re there and crash into you like a glass wall. Flesh constitutes a tradeoff: it lets you know that a person is standing before you, but you have no idea what this person means.”
― Esther Yi, Y/N

“As a human being who cannot live without love, I know full well that I have exhausted my options on this disappointing planet. The question is no longer ‘Who are the people who will accept my unusual love?’ but rather ‘How do I make my love more unusual and more unacceptable?”
― Esther Yi, Y/N

“There's the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you're a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them inside you, because, if you don't, there's no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity. But identity in a vacuum is also meaningless. Sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness. Otherwise you're just a cow, a cat, a stone, a thing in the world, trapped in your thingness. To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. . . . Your identity exists at the intersection of these lines of trust.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“One of the disconcerting and delightful teaching of the master was: "God is closer to sinners than to saints."
This is how he explained it: " God in heaven holds each person by a string. When you sin you cut the string. then God ties it up again, making a knot-and therby bringing you a little closer to him. Again and again your sins cut the string-and with each further knot God keeps drawing you closer and closer.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“To deny our errors is to deny ourself, for to be human is to be imperfect, somehow error—prone. To be human is to ask unanswerable questions, but to persist in asking them, to be broken and ache for wholeness, to hurt and to try to find a way to healing through the hurt...Spirituality accepts that "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”
― Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham

“The question "Who am I?" really asks, "Where do I belong or fit?" We get the sense of that "direction" -- the sense of moving toward the place where we fit, or of shaping the place toward which we are moving so that it will fit us -- from hearing how others have handled or are attempting to handle similar (but never exactly the same) situations. We learn by listening to their stories, by hearing how they came (or failed) to belong or fit.”
― Ernest Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

“Everyone should be able to do one card trick, tell two jokes, and recite three poems, in case they are ever trapped in an elevator.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“If writers wrote as carelessly as some people talk, then adhasdh asdglaseuyt[bn[ pasdlgkhasdfasdf.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs — something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.”
― E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“He suffers, so to speak, from the violence done to him by the self. The analogous passion of Christ signifies God's suffering on account of the injustice of the world and the darkness of man. The human and the divine set up a relationship of complimentarity with compensating effects. Through the Christ-symbol, man can get to know the real meaning of his suffering: he is on the way to realizing his wholeness. As a result of the integration of conscious and unconscious, his ego enters the “divine” realm, where it participates in “God's suffering.” The cause of the suffering is in both cases the same, namely “incarnation,” which on the human level appears as “individuation.”
― C.G. Jung

“A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“I am looking for friends. What does that mean -- tame?"

"It is an act too often neglected," said the fox. "It means to establish ties."

"To establish ties?"

"Just that," said the fox. "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world....”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”
― Ernesto "Che" Guevara

“LOVE Katharine Hepburn said: “Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only what you are expecting to give — which is everything.” Love is heart-power and it can’t be defined by the brain. It showers us with magic, as Thomas Moore put it, “and even in the midst of pain it can offer moments of rapture.” Love at the end of life is a force that cannot be denied. Nor can it be rationed, for love overflows and cannot be contained. True love is unconditional. We need do nothing. Love just is!”
― Karen Speerstra, The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying

“When we embrace all our feelings, all our emotions including suffering, hope will endure and sustain us. We can then truly live and face our last moments with integrity and wholeness.”
― Karen Speerstra, The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying