Adonisdream

“He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others.

In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches.

Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms.”
― Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus

“It's time, Old Captain, lift anchor, sink!

The land rots; we shall sail into the night;

if now the sky and sea are black as ink

our hearts, as you must know, are filled with light.

Only when we drink poison are we well —

we want, this fire so burns our brain tissue,

to drown in the abyss — heaven or hell,

who cares? Through the unknown, we'll find the new. ("Le Voyage")”
― Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil and Other Works/Les Fleurs du Mal et Oeuvres Choisies : A Dual-Language Book

“In captivity, in the shed, Pierre had learned, not with his mind, but with his whole being, his life, that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfying of natural human needs, and that all unhappiness comes not from lack, but from superfluity; but now, in these last three weeks of the march, he had learned a new and more comforting truth - he had learned that there is nothing frightening in the world. He had learned that, as there is no situation in the world in which a man can be happy and perfectly free, so there is no situation in which he can be perfectly unhappy and unfree. He had learned that there is a limit to suffering and a limit to freedom, and that those limits are very close; that the man who suffers because one leaf is askew in his bed of roses, suffers as much as he now suffered falling asleep on the bare, damp ground, one side getting cold as the other warmed up; that when he used to put on his tight ballroom shoes, he suffered just as much as now, when he walked quite barefoot (his shoes had long since worn out) and his feet were covered with sores.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace