Lucy

“It's easy to run to others. It's so hard to stand on one's own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It's easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It's simple to seek substitutes for competence--such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Nicht Mord. Nicht Diebstahl, Raub oder nächtlicher Einbruch – auch Meineid nicht. Denn das alles sind ja Dinge, die man meist Leuten antut, die man haßt oder die einem gleichgültig sind und einen nichts angehen. […] Das Infamste von allem – das ist, wenn der Freund das Vertrauen des Freundes missbraucht.”
― Henrik Ibsen, John Gabriel Borkman

“I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions