Jon

“The human yearning is not merely marked by a ‘striving toward’, but equally by an ‘escape from.”
― Peter Wessel Zapffe

“I don’t feel guilt at being unsociable, though I may sometimes regret it because my loneliness is painful. But when I move into the world, it feels like a moral fall – like seeking love in a whorehouse.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“Save all your energies and time for breaking the wall your mind has built around you.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“In all our actions, including those that appear selfless, we are in search of some kind of pleasure, even if it is only the pleasure of self-esteem. But while our desire for pleasure is infinite, our mental and physical organs are capable only of limited and temporary pleasures; and this mismatch between desire and capacity dooms us to perpetual dissatisfaction. There is no pleasure big or total enough to quench, even momentarily, our thirst for pleasure. But since the absence of pleasure is pain, it follows that we are always in pain, even when we might believe otherwise. And if life is nothing but an unbroken experience of pain, it would be better for every human being never to have been born.”
― Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone