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#1

“My library is an archive of longings.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

tags: books, library, longing

3451 likes

#2

“Of all men’s miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing.”
― Herodotus, The Histories

tags: power-helplessness

395 likes

#3

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

tags: knowing-others, perception, self-awareness, understanding

3832 likes

#4

“As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.”
― Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

tags: ideology, success

84 likes

#5

“Non est ad astra mollis e terris via" - "There is no easy way from the earth to the stars”
― Seneca

tags: latin, philosophy, stars

1148 likes

#6

“Non nobis solum nati sumus.

(Not for ourselves alone are we born.)”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

tags: duty, helping-others, latin, self

710 likes

#7

“Pulvis et umbra sumus. (We are but dust and shadow.)”
― Horace, The Odes of Horace

tags: death, dust, greek, latin, life, shadow

796 likes

#8

“Omnia mutantur, nihil interit (everything changes, nothing perishes).”
― Publius Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses

tags: classic, latin

378 likes

#9

“Fas est ab hoste doceri.
One should learn even from one's enemies.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

tags: ancient, latin, philosophy

381 likes

#10

“Ut haec ipsa qui non sentiat deorum vim habere is nihil omnino sensurus esse videatur."

If any man cannot feel the power of God when he looks upon the stars, then I doubt whether he is capable of any feeling at all.”
― Horace

tags: ancient-rome, classics, horace, latin

254 likes

#11

“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY - MAN

tags: absence, existence, fear, hurt, love, risk

2494 likes

#12

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

tags: ambiguity, virtue

5968 likes

#13

“Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

tags: nightmare

151 likes

#14

“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

5457 likes

#15

“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”
― Margaret Atwood

tags: love, obsession, sleep

4183 likes

#16

“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

tags: memory, pain

1995 likes

#17

“If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

tags: foresight, knowledge, women

1596 likes

#18

“The only reason we don't open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don't feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else's eyes. ”
― Pema Chodron

908 likes

#19

“If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it’s fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there’s an arrow in your heart...”
― Pema Chödrön, Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living

tags: awakening, buddhism, mindfulness

498 likes

#20

“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

tags: atheism, existentialism, follow-your-bliss, self-actualization, self-determination

1486 likes

#21

“Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?”
― Cornelia Funke

tags: books, character, cornelia-funke, existentialism, words, writers, writing

1186 likes

#22

“But these words people threw around - humans, monsters, heroes, villains - to Victor it was all just a matter of semantics. Someone could call themselves a hero and still walk around killing dozens. Someone else could be labeled a villain for trying to stop them. Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human.”
― V.E. Schwab, Vicious

tags: heroes, humans, monsters, villains

948 likes

#23

“What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.”
― Werner Herzog

tags: dreams, monsters, ocean, sleep

669 likes

#24

“Broken people don't hide from their monsters. Broken people let themselves be eaten.”
― Francesca Zappia, Eliza and Her Monsters

tags: eliza-and-her-monsters, monster, monsters

380 likes

#25

“Oh," the girl said, shaking her head. "Don't be so simple. People adore monsters. They fill their songs and stories with them. They define themselves in relation to them. You know what a monster is, young shade? Power. Power and choice. Monsters make choices. Monsters shape the world. Monsters force us to become stronger, smarter, better. They sift the weak from the strong and provide a forge for the steeling of souls. Even as we curse monsters, we admire them. Seek to become them, in some ways." Her eyes became distant. "There are far, far worse things to be than a monster.”
― Jim Butcher, Ghost Story

tags: ghost-story, harry-dresden, monsters

223 likes

#26

“A person's life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art or love or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.”
― Albert Camus

283 likes

#27

“I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”
― Raymond Carver

tags: heart, human-passion

1530 likes

#28

“I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

tags: dark, disillusionment

866 likes

#29

“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.”
― Gautama Buddha, Sayings of Buddha

tags: alone, buddha, buddhism, destiny, fate, future, lone, past, path, present, save, saying, walk

2066 likes

#30

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.”
― D.H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence

tags: dh-lawrence, self-pity

1108 likes

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