Jonas

“A hundred times I was upon the point of killing myself; but still I loved life. This ridiculous foible is perhaps one of our most fatal characteristics; for is there anything more absurd than to wish to carry continually a burden which one can always throw down? to detest existence and yet to cling to one's existence? in brief, to caress the serpent which devours us, till he has eaten our very heart?”
― Voltaire, Candide

“Of books, though, very little. And of the books
which to most literary persons are bread and butter, novels, history, poetry, plays, almost nothing at
all. It isn’t that they’re not interested in the psychological or moral or social life. In the social life,
they certainly are, more than most of us. In the
moral, they are by and large the soundest group of
intellectuals we have; there is a moral component
right in the grain of science itself, and almost all
scientists form their own judgments of the moral
life. In the psychological they have as much interest as most of us, though occasionally I fancy they
come to it rather late. It isn’t that they lack the interests. It is much more that the whole literature of
the traditional culture doesn’t seem to them relevant to those interests. They are, of course, dead
wrong. As a result, their imaginative understanding is less than it could be. They are self-impoverished.”
― C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures

“Es ist auch überdies jammerschade, wenn ein Mensch in Verzweiflung stirbt. Die Verzweiflung schickt uns Gott nicht, um uns zu töten, er schickt sie uns, um neues Leben in uns zu wecken.”
― Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

“To thoroughly understand the world, to explain it, to despise it, may be the thing great thinkers do. But I'm only interested in being able to love the world, not to despise it, not to hate it and me, to be able to look upon it and me and all beings with love and admiration and great respect.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha