"I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it. I know I'll never jump again."
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (1938)

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"Convictions are are more dangerous foes of truth than lies."
- Friedrich Nietzche

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"There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn."

"A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing."

"Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable."
- Albert Camus

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"My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers."

"We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to."

"As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and aesthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?"

"I don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope."

"Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out every day: massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without destroying each other, without hating each other to death? As a matter of fact, they do hate each other, but they are not equal to their hatred. And it is this mediocrity, this impotence, that saves society, that assures its continuance, its stability."

“The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.”

"We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly."

"To see things as they really are renders life almost completely intolerable."
- Emil Cioran

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“No matter what you do this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.”
- Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy ♥♥♥♥♥♥

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"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
- HP Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

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"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."
- Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1929

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"I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder."

"Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness."

“Of course we are challenging nature itself, and it hits back, it hits back, that’s all… and that’s what’s grandiose about it, that’s all and we have to accept that it is stronger than we are. Kinski always says it’s full of erotic elements… I don’t see it so much as erotic; I see it more as full of obscenity. And nature here is violent, base… I wouldn’t see anything erotical here, I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course there is a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing, they just screech in pain."

“Taking a close look at what is around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel. And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it, I love it very much, but I love it against my better judgment.”
- Werner Herzog

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"There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face … forever."
- George Orwell, 1984

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“What would have become of Hercules do you think if there had been no lion, hydra, stag or boar - and no savage criminals to rid the world of? What would he have done in the absence of such challenges?
Obviously he would have just rolled over in bed and gone back to sleep. So by snoring his life away in luxury and comfort he never would have developed into the mighty Hercules.
And even if he had, what good would it have done him? What would have been the use of those arms, that physique, and that noble soul, without crises or conditions to stir into him action?”

“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”

“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will. ”

“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
-Epictetus

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"What need is there to weep over parts of life when the whole of it calls for tears."
-Seneca

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“It is better to know how to learn than to know.”
- Dr. Seuss