People fall in love at the same time - often at the same stunning moment - but they fall out of love at different times. One is left sadly juggling the pieces of a fractured heart while the other had danced away. 
-Robert Comier, 8 Plus 1

Knowing others is intelligence;

knowing yourself is true wisdom. 

Mastering others is strength;

mastering yourself is true power.

If you realize that you have enough,

you are truly rich.

If you stay in the center 

and embrace death with your whole heart, 

you will endure forever.

Tao Te Ching, No. 33

"The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves."

Alan Watts

The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn’t interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative.

Charles Bukowski

She was so quiet. So reflective. And she could erase herself, he spirit, with a swiftness that truly startled, when she knew the people around her could not respect it 

Alice Walker

None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever.
-Eugene O'Neilll, Long Days Journey Into Night

I have the choice of being constantly active 


and happy or introspectively passive and sad.


Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.

— SYLVIA PLATH

The real damage is done by those millions who want to ‘survive.’ The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.

Sophie Scholl (1921-1943). Anti-nazi activist, and one of the members of Die Weisse Rose (The White Rose).

In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused.
- Michael Crichton (Timeline)


"I want to be alive again," she said. "Not in this half-life. I want to be really alive. I want to feel my heart pumping in my chest again. I want to feel blood moving through me  - hot, and salty, and real. It's weird, you don't think you can feel it, the blood, but believe me, when it stops flowing, you'll know."
Neil Gaiman, American Gods

"She was no longer that happy creature who in earlier youth wandered with me on the banks of the lake and talked with ecstasy of our future prospects. The first of those sorrows which are sent to wean us from the earth had visited her, and it's dimming influence quenched her dearest smiles"

Mary Shelley

"We were all brought up to want things, and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting"

John Updike, Rabbit Bedux

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity. 

Draham Greene