“Echoes, shadows, inversions, fragments — this much writing can do. But the whole enchilada lives on a different plane.” — Zadie Smith, “The I Who Is Not Me”

“I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones.” — Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“To see that everything you experience is both a part of you and not you at all is what it means to be empty. When you are empty, you are free. You allow everything to arise and depart in its own time.” Read more: suliqyre.substack.com/p/being-empt...

“The art of recollecting is not easy, because in the moment of preparation it can become something different, whereas memory merely fluctuates between remembering correctly and remembering incorrectly. (1/2)

“No truly great thing is created suddenly.” — Epictetus, Discourses

“If only some eternal book existed, primed for our enjoyment and whims, no less inventive in the populous morning as in the secluded night, oriented toward all hours of the world. Your favorite books, reader, are like the rough drafts of that book without a final reading.” — Jorge Luis Borges

“To conceive that compulsion and punishment are the proper means of reformation is the sentiment of a barbarian.” — William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice

“Criticism always adds and never subtracts. It is itself a kind of creative practice, and every critique is also its own creation.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/critic...

“The spiritual liberation of man is the realization of personality in man. It is the attainment of wholeness. And at the same time it is unwearied conflict.” — Nikolai Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom

“It is better to know nothing than to half-know many things.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“We have lost all sense of living normally, simply, directly. To get back to that normality, that simplicity, that directness, you cannot follow methods, you cannot merely become automatic machines... (1/2)

“Nothing can refute the skeptic — nothing can do what epistemology hoped to do.” — Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

“Where there is still room for awareness to grow, there is also room for suffering to arise again from attachment.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/despis...

“Corruption of politics has nothing to do with the morals, or the laxity of morals, of various political personalities. Its cause is altogether a material one. (1/2)

“The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Divinity College Address”

“Ordinarily we value a work of art because of the seriousness and dignity of what it achieves. … But there are other creative sensibilities besides the seriousness (both tragic and comic) of high culture and of the high style of evaluating people. (1/2)

“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.” — Hannah Arendt, “Interview with Roger Errera”, The New York Review of Books (26 October 1978)

“That so many are struggling with unmet needs means that significant changes are required. Changes not just to individuals but also to the systems we have constructed that actively work against compassion.” Read more: suliqyre.substack.com/p/every-last...

“Look deep inside. Things are seldom what they seem, and ignorance, which sees no deeper than the bark, often turns to disillusion when it penetrates into things.” — Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom

“Aim at being loved without being admired.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Simple, sincere people seldom speak much of their piety. It shows itself in acts rather than in words, and has more influence than homilies or protestations.” — Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“She knows she can't do everything. She isn't asking for supernatural powers. What bothers her is the imposed requirement to exclude. She doesn't want to abandon things or people. She wants to stay open to everything that might be possible for her.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/tired-...

“He who thinks and thinks for himself, will always have a claim to thanks; it is no matter whether it be right or wrong, so as it be explicit. If it is right, it will serve as a guide to direct; if wrong, as a beacon to warn.” — Jeremy Bentham, Collected Works

“Without political equality there can be no real political liberty, but political equality will be possible only when there is social and economic equality.” — Mikhail Bakunin, Revolutionary Catechism

“To be scrupulous. Reject everything about the real that does not become true. (The dreadful reality of the false.)” — Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematograph

“To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“The problem is that we cannot see why the other ought to receive compassion. We are unable to see them as one of us, so they remain an other, an outsider not entitled to anything.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/how-we...

“Many of the confused controversies of modern philosophy are like the legends and gods of classical poetry. They recur in every system, but always in a new form.” — Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments

“No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues, only their secret vices.” — Bertrand Russell, On Education, Especially in Early Childhood

“Narrative exists as an extraordinary complex of expectations. … The sense of expectations violated can be just as pleasurable, or even more so, than the sense of expectations fulfilled.” — Samuel R. Delany, “Some Remarks on Narrative and Technology”

“Man holds his ground only by surpassing himself, in the same sense in which it is said that one ceases to love if one does not love increasingly everyday.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet

“Greater awareness necessarily means greater compassion, and compassion demands action. To act from compassion is to use every last tool in whatever ways it must be used to meet needs and reduce suffering.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/every-...

“By its regression to magic under late capitalism, thought is assimilated to late capitalist forms. The asocial twilight phenomena in the margins of the system, the pathetic attempts to squint through the chinks in its walls, (1/2)

“There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are eternal, universal and indestructible.” — Frederick Douglass, "Our Composite Nationality (1869)"

“I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acceptation of a way of life wherein each moment has meaning only in relation to another or others that will follow it.” — Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

“It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.” — Voltaire, Zadig

“You have at least only a thin shell to break before emerging from the darkness inside the egg into the light of truth. … The egg is this world we see. The bird in it is Love, the Love which is God himself and which lives in the depths of every man, though at first as an invisible seed. (1/2)

“Nothing is more highly to be prized than the value of each day.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections

“All narratives were inevitably the work of narrators, male or female, who by nature, by form, could be only a fragment among fragments of reality...” — Elena Ferrante, In the Margins

“Perhaps it is my liking for stone that attracts me so much to sculpture. It restores to the human form the weight and indifference without which I cannot see any greatness in it.” — Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1942-1951

“Suffering is present because I'm attached to something. It might be a desire for success, an aversion to a dreadful outcome, or a belief about what I'm supposed to do. All of these intentions are similar in terms of the suffering they can produce through attachment.” suliqyre.com/posts/stress...

“In the case of the body, it is best to let it go along with things. In the case of the emotions, it is best to let them follow where they will. By going along with things, you avoid becoming separated from them. (1/2)

“There is no one more unfortunate than the man who has never been unfortunate, for it has never been in his power to try himself.” — Seneca, On Providence

“The imperfect is the tense of fascination: it seems to be alive and yet it doesn’t move: imperfect presence, imperfect death; neither oblivion nor resurrection; simply the exhausting lure of memory.” — Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

“Most writers are at once their own readers — as they write — and that is why so many traces of the reader appear in their works — so many critical considerations — so much which is the province of the reader and not the writer.” — Novalis, Teplitz Fragments

“The artist is, of course, accustomed to taking risks. Everything they make is a risk, for there is no way of knowing whether or not their creation will be any good before it is complete, and no way of being certain that others will appreciate it once it is.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/outrag...

“What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case?” — Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

“I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.” — George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“God is not Time; God generates or urges all things into development that the plan completes itself in continual creation. All we know is that things happen. (1/2)

“The faults of children, the feeble, the indigent, and the ignorant, are the faults of husbands, fathers, the strong, and the rich.” — Victor Hugo, Les Miserables