Antoninus

“You think that I am naive, but it is you who are naive. You have no idea what is happening inside of you when you look at a painting. You think that you are getting close to art voluntarily, enticed by its beauty, that this intimacy is taking place in an atmosphere of freedom and that delight is being born in you spontaneously, lured by the divine rod of Beauty. In truth, a hand has grabbed you by the scruff of the neck, led you to this painting and has thrown you to your knees. A will mightier than your own told you to attempt to experience the appropriate emotions. Whose hand and whose will? That hand is not the hand of a single man, the will is collective, born in an interhuman dimension, quite alien to you. So you do not admire at all, you merely try to admire.”
― Witold Gombrowicz , Diary

“If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”
― W. I. Thomas

“Practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual and moral.”
― Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

“276.—Absence extinguishes small passions and increases great ones, as the wind will blow out a candle, and blow in a fire.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims