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“But a man of honour should never forget what he is because he sees what others are.”
― Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom

“If she ever knew me at all she must later have discovered that for those of us who feel deeply and who are at all conscious of the inextricable tangle of human thought there is only one response to be made—ironic tenderness and silence.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“For thousands of years a debate has been going on in the shadowy background of human affairs. The issue to be resolved: “What should we say about being alive?” Overwhelmingly, people have said, “Being alive is all right.” More thoughtful persons have added, “Especially when you consider the alternative,” disclosing a jocularity as puzzling as it is macabre, since the alternative is here implied to be both disagreeable and, upon consideration, capable of making being alive seem more agreeable than it alternatively would, as if the alternative were only a possibility that may or may not come to pass, like getting the flu, rather than a looming inevitability. And yet this covertly portentous remark is perfectly well tolerated by anyone who says that being alive is all right. These individuals stand on one side of the debate. On the other side is an imperceptible minority of disputants. Their response to the question of what we should say about being alive will be neither positive nor equivocal. They may even fulminate about how objectionable it is to be alive, or spout off that to be alive is to inhabit a nightmare without hope of awakening to a natural world, to have our bodies embedded neck-deep in a quagmire of dread, to live as shut-ins in a house of horrors from which nobody gets out alive, and so on. Now, there are really no incisive answers as to why anyone thinks or feels one way and not another. The most we can say is that the first group of people is composed of optimists, although they may not think of themselves as such, while the contending group, that imperceptible minority, is composed of pessimists.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

“But there’s a second, blunter approach that perhaps more accurately captures the Basilisk’s stony gaze, which is that in a worldview where legitimate power is defined as power that is successfully applied, there’s no legitimate authority quite like the men with guns who kick down your door in the middle of the night.”
― Elizabeth Sandifer, Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right