Olivia Ostler

“The most important, without doubt, is gratitude. The reason Dostoyevsky’s devil cannot feel gratitude is that only a person intent on great evil would be denied, or deny themselves, this crucial human attribute. Without an ability to feel gratitude, all of human life and human experience is a marketplace of blame, where people tear up the landscape of the past and present hoping to find other people to blame and upon whom they can transfer their frustrations. Without gratitude, the prevailing attitudes of life are blame and resentment. Because if you do not feel any gratitude for anything that has been passed on to you, then all you can feel is bitterness over what you have not got. Bitterness that everything did not turn out better or more exactly to your liking—whatever that “liking” might be. Without some sense of gratitude, it is impossible to get anything into any proper order.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“Death is at all times solemn, but never so much so as at sea,” one sailor recalled. “The man is near you—at your side—you hear his voice, and in an instant he is gone, and nothing but a vacancy shows his loss….There is always an empty berth in the forecastle, and one man wanting when the small night watch is mustered. There is one less to take the wheel, and one less to lay out with you upon the yard. You miss his form, and the sound of his voice, for habit had made them almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

“Modern man is a prisoner who thinks he is free because he refrains from touching the walls of his dungeon.”
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a Un Texto Implicito: Obra Completa