nur

“Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“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

“did you think i was a city
big enough for a weekend getaway
i am the town surrounding it
the one you've never heard of
but always pass through
there are no neon lights here
no skyscapers or statues
but there is thunder
for i make bridges tremble
i am not street meat i am homemade jam
thick enough to cut the sweetest
thing you lips will touch
i am not police sirens
i am the crackle of a fireplace
i'd burn you and you still
couldn't take your eyes off of me
cause i'd look so beautiful doing it
you'd blush
i am not a hotel room i am home
i am not the whiskey you want
i am the water you need
don't come here with expectations
and try to make a vacation out of me”
― Rupi Kaur, Milk and honey

“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