a a

“Now we are the masters of our fate, that the task which has been set us is not above our strength; that its pangs and toils are not beyond our endurance. As long as we have faith in our cause and an unconquerable willpower, salvation will not be denied us.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“The island of Sicily is the largest in the Mediterranean. It has also
proved, over the centuries, to be the most unhappy. The stepping-stone
between Europe and Africa, the gateway between the East and the West, the
link between the Latin world and the Greek, at once a stronghold,
observation-point and clearing-house, it has been fought over and occupied
in turn by all the great powers that have at various times striven to extend
their dominion across the Middle Sea. It has belonged to them all—and yet
has properly been part of none; for the number and variety of its
conquerors, while preventing the development of any strong national
individuality of its own, have endowed it with a kaleidoscopic heritage of
experience which can never allow it to become completely assimilated.
Even today, despite the beauty of its landscape, the fertility of its fields and
the perpetual benediction of its climate, there lingers everywhere some
dark, brooding quality—some underlying sorrow of which poverty, Church
influence, the Mafia and all the other popular modern scapegoats may be
the manifestations but are certainly not the cause. It is the sorrow of long,
unhappy experience, of opportunity lost and promise unfulfilled; the
sorrow, perhaps, of a beautiful woman who has been raped too often and
betrayed too often and is no longer fit for love or marriage. Phoenicians,
Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Goths, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans,
Germans, Spaniards, French—all have left their mark. Today, a century
after being received into her Italian home, Sicily is probably less unhappy
than she has been for many centuries; but though no longer lost she still
seems lonely, seeking always an identity which she can never entirely find.”
― john julius norwich, The Normans in Sicily : The Magnificent Story of 'the Other Norman Conquest'

“The men who indulged in nocturnal thought, it seemed to me, had without exception dry, lusterless skins and sagging stomachs. They sought to wrap up a whole epoch in a capacious night of ideas, and rejected in all its forms the sun that I had seen. They rejected both life and death as I had seen them, for in both of these the sun had had a hand.”
― Yukio Mishima, Sun & Steel

“Man, the bravest of animals and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering.
The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far―and the ascetic ideal offered man meaning!
It was the only meaning offered so far; any meaning is better than none at all; the ascetic ideal was in every sense the "faute de mieux" par excellence so far.
In it, suffering was interpreted; the tremendous void seemed to have been filled; the door was closed to any kind of suicidal nihilism.
This interpretation - there is no doubt of it - brought fresh suffering with it, deeper, more inward, more poisonous, more life-destructive suffering: it placed all suffering under the perspective of guilt.
But all this notwithstanding - man was saved thereby, he possessed a meaning, he was henceforth no longer 1ike a leaf in the wind, a plaything of nonsense - the "sense-less" - he could now willsomething; no matter at first to what end, why, with what he willed: the will itself was saved.
We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing which has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself.
All this means - let us dare to grasp it - a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will.
Man would rather will nothingness than not will at all.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals