Diana > Diana's Quotes

“We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.”
― W H Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“She believed in nothing. Only her scepticism kept her from being an atheist.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Meaning and morality of One's life come from within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self expansion by experimenting and by living dangerously. Life consists of an infinite number of possibilities and the healthy person explores as many of them as posible. Religions that teach pity, self-contempt, humility, self-restraint and guilt are incorrect. The good life is ever changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative and risky.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Stupidity in a woman is unfeminine.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

“Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.”
― Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death

“Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
― Rudyard Kipling

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

“How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it and why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought by a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn't it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager—I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“The less we read, the more harmful it is what we read.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“Man is perishing. That may be, and if it is nothingness that awaits us let us so act that it will be an unjust fate.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.”
― Albert Camus

“It is a mistake to think that moving fast is the same as actually going somewhere.”
― Steve Goodier

“I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“When an inner situation is not made conscious it appears outside as fate.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.”
― Jim Morrison

“That's what real love amounts to - letting a person be what he really is. Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending - performing. You get to love your pretence. It's true, we're locked in an image, an act - and the sad thing is, people get so used to their image, they grow attached to their masks. They love their chains. They forget all about who they really are. And if you try to remind them, they hate you for it, they feel like you're trying to steal their most precious possession.”
― Jim Morrison

“When others demand that we become the people they want us to be, they force us to destroy the person we really are. It's a subtle kind of murder ... the most loving parents and relatives commit this murder with smiles on their faces.”
― Jim Morrison

“Fear is the cheapest room in the house.
I would like to see you living
In better conditions.”
― Hafiz

“Your heart and my heart
are very, very old friends.”
― Hafiz

“The perception of other people and the intersubjective world is problematic only for adults. The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him. He has no awares of himself or of others as private subjectives, nor does he suspect that all of us, himself included, are limited to one certain point of view of the world. That is why he subjects neither his thoughts, in which he believes as they present themselves, to any sort of criticism. He has no knowledge of points of view. For him men are empty heads turned towards one single, self-evident world where everything takes place, even dreams, which are, he thinks, in his room, and even thinking, since it is not distinct from words.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“A million years of evolution," Eric said bitterly, "and what are we? Animals.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“It is a terrible thing to be so open: it is as if my heart put on a face and walked into the world.”
― Sylvia Plath, Drei Frauen: Ein Gedicht für drei Stimmen

“I feel occasionally my skull will crack, fatigue is continuous - I only go from less exhausted to more exhausted & back again.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Adventures of Sally