Vanessa

“Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there. If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am. What in fact I am, if only the Manichee I think I am would allow me to know it, is the reconciliation of yes and no lived out in total acceptance and the blessed experience of Not-Two.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship, but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul. Speak boldly with him as with yourself. As to yourself, although you should live in such a way that you trust your own self with nothing which you could not entrust even your enemy, yet, since certain matters occur which convention keeps secret, you should share at least all your worries and reflections. Regard him as loyal, and you will make him loyal. Some, for example, fearing to be deceived, have taught men to deceive; by their suspicions, they have given their friend the right to do wrong.”
― Seneca, Letters From A Stoic | Moral Letters To Lucilius

“That was one of the oddities of what they called “given opinion” that they learned that summer. They had been brought up in a tradition that told them in one way or another that the life of the mind and the life of the senses were separate and, indeed, inimical; they had believed, without ever having really thought about it, that one had to be chosen at some expense of the other. That the one could intensify the other had never occurred to them; and since the embodiment came before the recognition of the truth, it seemed a discovery that belonged to them alone. They began to collect these oddities of “given opinion,” and they hoarded them as if they were treasures; it helped to isolate them from the world that would give them these opinions, and it helped draw them together in a small but moving way.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“It occurred to him that he had never before known the body of another; and it occurred to him further that that was the reason he had always somehow separated the self of another from the body that carried that self around. And it occurred to him at last, with the finality of knowledge, that he had never known another human being with any intimacy or trust or with the human warmth of commitment.”
― John Williams, Stoner