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#1

“Je suis comme ça. Ou j'oublie tout de suite ou je n'oublie jamais."

Samuel BECKETT, En attendant Godot

I'm like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget. ”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

tags: french

409 likes

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#3

“tis a majestic thing, The darkness.”
― Euripides, The Bacchae

3 likes

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#5

“Historically, the common form of revolution has been a not-too-efficient despotism which is overthrown by another non-too-efficient despotism with little or no effect on the public good. Indeed, except for the change in the names of the ruling circles, it would be hard to distinguish one from the other.”
― Gordon Tullock

tags: revolution

2 likes

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#6

“Morning or night, Friday or Sunday, made no difference, everything was the same: the gnawing, excruciating, incessant pain; that awareness of life irrevocably passing but not yet gone; that dreadful, loathsome death, the only reality, relentlessly closing in on him; and that same endless lie. What did days, weeks, or hours matter?”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

216 likes

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#7

“Me miserable! Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat'ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

380 likes

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#8

“One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.”
― Gustave Flaubert

tags: deeds, feelings, life, self-control

583 likes

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#8

“ATHENA: You wish to be called righteous rather than act right. [...] I say, wrong must not win by technicalities.”
― Aeschylus, The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides

38 likes

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#9

“All is not lost, the unconquerable will, and study of revenge, immortal hate, and the courage never to submit or yield.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

392 likes

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#10

“The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

1643 likes

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#10

“Cleverness is not wisdom.”
― Euripides, The Bacchae

189 likes

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#11

“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

tags: antinatalism

361 likes

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#12

“My shadow serves as the friend I crave.”
― Anna Akhmatova

tags: friendship, lonliness

173 likes

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#13

“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Prose Works Of Ralph Waldo Emerson

tags: essay, inspirational, lecture, nonfiction, philosophy, self-reliance, social-commentary, transcendentalism

2650 likes

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#14

“I have a lot of work to do today;
I need to slaughter memory,
Turn my living soul to stone
Then teach myself to live again.”
― Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

tags: living, poetry, soul

170 likes

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#15

“As the future ripens in the past,
so the past rots in the future --
a terrible festival of dead leaves.”
― Anna Akhmatova, Poems of Akhmatova

tags: future, past, poetry

147 likes

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#16

“One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.”
― Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

106 likes

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#17

“Knowledge is not wisdom: cleverness is not, not without awareness of our death, not without recalling just how brief our flare is. He who overreaches will, in his overreaching, lose what he possesses, betray what he has now. That which is beyond us, which is greater than the human, the unattainably great, is for the mad, or for those who listen to the mad, and then believe them.”
― Euripides, The Bacchae

45 likes

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#18

“The word landed with a stony thud
Onto my still-beating breast.
Nevermind, I was prepared,
I will manage with the rest.

I have a lot of work to do today;
I need to slaughter memory,
Turn my living soul to stone
Then teach myself to live again. . .

But how. The hot summer rustles
Like a carnival outside my window;
I have long had this premonition
Of a bright day and a deserted house. ”
― Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

101 likes

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#19

“Sunset in the ethereal waves:
I cannot tell if the day
is ending, or the world, or if
the secret of secrets is inside me again.”
― Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

27 likes

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#21

“Not to be born at all
Is best, far best that can befall,
Next best, when born, with least delay
To trace the backward way.
For when youth passes with its giddy train,
Troubles on troubles follow, toils on toils,
Pain, pain forever pain;
And none escapes life's coils.
Envy, sedition, strife,
Carnage and war, make up the tale of life.”
― Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

73 likes

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#21

“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

tags: goals-in-life, purpose-of-life

2974 likes

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#22

“Madness with its wings
Has covered half my soul
It feeds me fiery wine
And lures me into the abyss.

That's when I understood
While listening to my alien delirium
That I must hand the victory
To it.”
― Anna Akhmatova

0 likes

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#23

“Dostoyevsky knew a lot but not everything. He, for instance, thought that if you kill a human you’ll turn into Raskolnikov. But we know now that one can kill five – ten, one hundred people – and go to the theatre in the evening.”
― Anna Akhmatova

tags: dostoevsky, killer, killing

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#24

“Il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action.

(There is no reality except in action.)”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

tags: action, existentialism, handeln, inspirational, philosophy, reality

321 likes

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#26

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
― Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost

tags: belief, bias, knowledge, perception, philosophy, reality

1058 likes

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#26

“Now no one will listen to songs. The prophesied days have begun. Latest poem of mine, the world has lost its wonder, Don’t break my heart, don’t ring out.”
― Anna Akhmatova

tags: song, songs

0 likes

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#27

“I drink to our ruined house, to the dolor of my life, to our loneliness together; and to you I raise my glass, to lying lips that have betrayed us, to dead-cold pitiless eyes, and to the hard realities; that the world is brutal and coarse, that God, in fact, has not saved us.”
― Anna Akhmatova

tags: betrayal, cold, despair, lonely, sadness, wine

4 likes

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#28

“Often, the outward and visible material signs and symbols of happiness and success only show themselves when the process of decline has already set in. The outer manifestations take time - like the light of that star up there, which may in reality be already quenched, when it looks to us to be shining its brightest.”
― Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family

26 likes

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#29

“One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

245 likes

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#30

“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

tags: books

3243 likes

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french
revolution
deeds
feelings
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self-control
antinatalism
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lonliness
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self-reliance
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