Agostinho Paulo

“Man cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action uncritically, unthinkingly. He accepts the cultural programming that turns his nose where he is supposed to look; he doesn’t bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small manageable pieces, as a beaver does. He uses all kinds of techniques, which we call the “character defenses”: he learns not to expose himself, not to stand out; he learns to embed himself in other-power, both of concrete persons and of things and cultural commands; the result is that he comes to exist in the imagined infallibility of the world around him. He doesn’t have to have fears when his feet are solidly mired and his life mapped out in a ready-made maze. All he has to do is to plunge ahead in a compulsive style of drivenness in the “ways of the world.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“You shall love beyond yourselves some day! So first, learn to love. And for that you have to drink the bitter cup of your love.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield”
― William Butler Yeats

“It makes a great difference by what path we come to a knowledge of certain things. If we begin in our youth with metaphysics and religion we can easily proceed along a series of rational conclusions that will lead us to the immortality of the soul. Not every other path will lead to this, at least not quite so easily.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books