Artem Tabakov

“If you are unwilling to write from the honest, though perhaps far from the final, point of view that represents your present state, you may come to your deathbed with your contribution to the world still unmade, and just as far from final conviction about the universe as you were at the age of twenty.”
― Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer

“The life of a healthy individual is characterized by fears, conflicting feelings, doubts, frustrations, as much as by the positive features. The main thing is that the man or woman feels he or she is living his or her own life, taking responsibility for action or inaction, and able to take credit for success and blame for failure. In one language it can be said that the individual has emerged from dependence to independence, or to autonomy.”
― D.W. Winnicott, Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst

“Both the Sublime and the Beautiful induce a state of submission that is often combined with the possibility of getting lost. They disorientate and undermine purpose. In one of several erotic sections in the Enquiry Burke describes the experience of looking at a beautiful woman’s body: it is, he writes, like a ‘deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye glides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried’. It”
― Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

“Calvinist believers were psychologically isolated. Their distance from God could only be precariously bridged, and their inner tensions only partially relieved, by unstinting, purposeful labor.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism