nur

“When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into full hardy? How did you know when to stop? In earlier, more rigid, less encouraging (and ultimately, more helpful) decades things would be much clearer. You would stop when you turned forty, or when you got married, or when you had kids, or after five years, or ten years or fifteen. And then you would go get a real job, and acting and your dreams for a career in it would recede into the evening, a melting into the story as quiet as a briquette of ice sliding into a warm bath.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Was it better to trust or to be wary? Could you have a real friendship, if some part of you was always expecting betrayal?”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“The woman wanderer goes forth to seek the Land of Freedom.

“How am I to get there?” Reason answers: “here is one way, and one only. Down the banks of Labour, through the water of suffering. There is no other.”

The woman cries out: “For what do I go to this far land which no one has ever reached? Oh, I am alone! I am utterly alone!”

But soon she hears the sounds of feet, ‘a thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands, and they beat this way!’

“They are the feet of those who shall follow you. Lead on.”
― Olive Schreiner

“Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly -- that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to oneself. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion -- these are the two things that govern us.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Stories