Bas Slootweg

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“Memories are the height of poetry only when they are memories of happiness. When they graze wounds over which scars have formed they become an aching pain.”
― Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov

“the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Essays, Letters and Miscellanies