Danna Peña

“God sees all our directing minds stripped of their material vessels, their husks and their dross. His contact is only between his own intelligence and what has flowed from him into these channels of ours. If you train yourself to do the same, you will be rid of what so much distracts you. Hardly likely, is it, that one blind to the enveloping flesh will spend his time eyeing clothes, houses, reputation, or any other such trappings and stage scenery?”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“For indeed, a man who aspires to rise above the mediocre, to be something more than ordinary, surely deserves admiration, even if in the end he fails and loses a fortune on account of his ambitions.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World

“What I know, what is certain, what I cannot deny, what I cannot reject—this is what counts.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“It may be thought that suicide follows revolt - but wrongly. For it does not represent the logical outcome of the revolt. It is just the contrary by the consent it presupposes. Suicide, like the leap, is acceptance at its extreme. Everything is over and man returns to his essential history. His future, his unique and dreadful future - he sees and rushes towards it. In its way, suicide settles the absurd. It engulfs the absurd in the same death. But I know that in order to keep alive, the absurd cannot be settled. It escapes suicide to the extent that it is simultaneously awareness and rejection of death. It is, at the extreme limit of the condemned man's last thought, that shoelace that despite everything he sees few yards away, on the very brink of his dizzying fall. The contrary of suicide, in fact, is a man condemned to death.”
― Albert Camus