Petra

“Those who feel the impulse to pursue the path of enlightenment should immediately take the step, and not defer it while they attend to all the other things on their mind.”
― Yoshida Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees

“It was her religion to make the best of everything.”
― Lyndall Gordon, Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft – The Unconventional Genius Who Founded Modern Feminism and Influenced Political Philosophy

“Barnet was a man with a rich capacity for misery, and there is no doubt that he exercised it to its fullest extent now. The events that had, as it were, dashed themselves together into one half-hour of this day showed that curious refinement of cruelty in their arrangement which often proceeds from the bosom of the whimsical god at other times known as blind Circumstance. That his few minutes of hope, between the reading of the first and second letters, had carried him to extraordinary heights of rapture was proved by the immensity of his suffering now. The sun blazing into his face would have shown a close watcher that a horizontal line, which had never been seen before, but which was never to be gone thereafter, was somehow gradually forming itself in the smooth of his forehead. His eyes, of a light hazel, had a curious look which can only be described by the word bruised; the sorrow that looked from them being largely mixed with the surprise of a man taken unawares.”
― Thomas Hardy

“I have possessed that heart, that noble soul, in whose presence I seemed to be more than I really was, because I was all that I could be.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe