Esterch

“Regardless of how you feel inside, always try to look like a winner. Even if you are behind, a sustained look of control and confidence can give you a mental edge that results in victory.”
― Arthur Ashe

“Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

“But when he had served the god faithfully for eleven days, it sometimes happened that other powers gained the ascendancy over him, and he would be seized with a violent craving for the coarse enjoyment of gross pleasures. Then he would plunge into dissipations, feverish with that human thirst for self-destruction which yearns, when the blood burns as hotly as blood can burn, for degradation, perverseness, filth, and smut, with precisely the measure of strength possessed by another equally human longing, the longing to keep one's self greater than one's self and purer.

In these moments there was but little that was rough and coarse enough for him, and when they had passed, it was long before he could regain his balance; for in truth these excesses were not natural to him; he was too healthy for them, too little poisoned by brooding. In a sense, they came as a rebound from his devotion to the higher spirits of his art, almost like a revenge, as though his nature had been violated by the pursuit of those idealistic aims which choice, aided by circumstances, had made his own.”
― Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne

“F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposite ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
― Amit Goswami, Quantum Creativity: Think Quantum, Be Creative