Kao

“There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realise that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.”
― Tennessee Williams

“If there is a God,
He will have to beg my forgiveness.”
― A phrase carved into a concentration camp cell by a Jewish Prisoner

“The envy I encountered in the business world, however, was nothing compared to what I would see later in the academic world. ‘The reason academic politics are so bitter is that so little is at stake,’ Henry Kissinger was fond of saying.59 There is a certain misery attached to the academic life, no doubt, in which envy plays a considerable part. As Max Weber noted, ‘Do you think that, year after year, you will be able to stand to see one mediocrity after another promoted over you, and still not become embittered and dejected? Of course, the answer is always: “Naturally, I live only for my calling." Only in a very few cases have I found [young academics] able to undergo it without suffering spiritual damage.’60”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
― Karl Marx, The German Ideology / Theses on Feuerbach / Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy