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“Playing the victim role: Manipulator portrays him- or herself as a victim of circumstance or of someone else's behavior in order to gain pity, sympathy or evoke compassion and thereby get something from another. Caring and conscientious people cannot stand to see anyone suffering and the manipulator often finds it easy to play on sympathy to get cooperation.”
― George K. Simon Jr., In Sheep's Clothing: Understanding and Dealing With Manipulative People

“Misery drives human beings into the future, misery drives them into a distant past so that they thereby can demonstrate the relative happiness of the present or console with the thought that at one time others lived well. It is the drive to find happiness that prevents human beings from discovering the lesson of their day, resignation; since happiness is not yet there, it obviously must be on the way, they conclude, or must already have been there. Or it is already there by comparison with prior unhappiness, etc. The same thing that drives on each human being drives them all on: they use history in order to become happier in the future.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Unpublished Writings from the Period of Unfashionable Observations

“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”

So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?

You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Take the I, cross it out in the middle, and you have a living christ - you yourself.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hometown Human: To Live for Soil and Society