Bertrand

“Children find everything in nothing, men find nothing in everything.”
― Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone di pensieri

“It is not a dead society that we want to revive. We leave that to those who go in for exoticism.”
― Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

“Oh! The vile indignity of the human condition! Oh! The undeserving condition of the human cowardice! Go and inquire the grass and the trees. They from themselves produce flowers, leaves and fruits; you from yourself, you produce nits, lice, and worms. They from themselves produce oil, wine, and balm; you from yourself send out mucous, urine, and dung. They from themselves send out the fragrance of sweetness; and you make of yourself an abomination of stench!”
Lothar of Segni, future Innocent III
quoted by Eugenio Garin in his History of Italian Philosophy”
― Innocent III, On the Misery of the Human Condition

“The everlasting and exclusive coming-to-be, the impermanence of everything actual, which constantly acts and comes-to-be but never is, as Heraclitus teaches it, is a terrible, paralyzing thought. Its impact on men can most nearly be likened to the sensation during an earthquake when one loses one's familiar confidence in a firmly grounded earth. It takes astonishing strength to transform this reaction into its opposite, into sublimity and the feeling of blessed astonishment.
(p.58)”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks