Joe Usher

“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

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“But profound as psychology is, it's a knife that cuts both ways (...). I have purposely resorted to this method, gentlemen of the jury, to show that you can prove anything by it. It all depends on who makes use of it. Psychology lures even most serious people into romancing, and quite unconsciously. I am speaking of the abuse of psychology, gentlemen.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“They will be tempted to search elsewhere for what they found all those years ago in Berlin and then tried and failed to find again that winter. But it will prove impossible because that abundance was the result of a specific overlap between the city's history and theirs. Intensely disorientated, they will find themselves unable to disentangle one from the other; and this, their sudden inability to access a version of their past unfiltered by nostalgia, will be their understanding of nostalgia.
How long will they be able to go on like this? In theory, forever.”
― Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection