“Wise friends chase away sorrows, and foolish ones gather them.” — Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom

“Every day that we fail to live out the maximum of our potentialities we kill the Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Christ which is in us.” — Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye

“I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.” — Henry David Thoreau, “Life Without Principle”

“Every experience we have is like reading a long and complicated book. As time passes, we forget the majority of what we've read, but the truth of the book is never lost. Every revelation of reality we encounter only further broadens our awareness.” Read more: suliqyre.substack.com/p/free-to-fo...

“There are many ways to avoid death in every kind of danger if one will venture to do or say anything to avoid it. It is not difficult to avoid death, gentlemen; it is much more difficult to avoid wickedness, for it runs faster than death. (1/2)

“Bad people are to be found everywhere, but even among the worst there may be something good.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

“Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable, and life is more than a dream.” — Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden

“I'm too energized and my attention refuses to settle. It's a wild animal. It goes where it wants, when it wants. Driven by an obscure need to seek, my attention shifts from one thing to the next.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/a-wild...

“Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister — corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. (1/2)

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things.” — Oscar Wilde, “Preface”, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. (1/2)

“Terror consists mostly of useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves.” — Friedrich Engels, Letters

“You want this moment of joy to last, but you know it's only temporary. You know that your situation will soon change and you will return to the pattern of ordinary life. Before you get to experience it fully, your joy is crowded out by suffering.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/being-...

“Being too busy has this result: that an individual very, very rarely is permitted to form a heart; on the other hand, the thinker, the poet, or the religious personality who actually has formed his heart, will never be popular, (1/2)

“You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you. Things can’t shape our decisions by themselves.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (6.52)

“Powers great or small do not fear fine words, or even harsh ones. In fact they often make books of them through their publishing firms, and with concise arguments, with similes and metaphors, they gain advantage.” — Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia

“It is the mark of a true love that one thinks of what the other person suffers. For he suffers too, is also a poor devil.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Nachlass, MS 131 (14 August 1946)

“We need to remember details in order to function in the normative world of society, but we do not need to remember details for life itself. Anything that obligates remembering is something we have created for ourselves.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/free-t...

“It is only up to a certain point that possessions make men more independent and free; one step further — and the possessions become master, the possessor becomes a slave: (1/2)

“Money often costs too much.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life

“All creation is a language and nothing but a language, which for some inexplicable reason we can’t read outside and can’t hear inside.” — Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“Our temperament decides the value of everything brought to us by fortune.” — François de La Rochefoucauld, Moral Reflections

“In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as if it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. (1/2)

“The world would be much happier, if men were as fully able to keep silence as they are able to speak.” — Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

“When “the sea flows in our veins … and the stars are our jewels,” when all things are perceived as infinite and holy, what motive can we have for covetousness or self-assertion, for the pursuit of power or the drearier forms of pleasure?” — Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

“The need to raise itself above humanity is humanity's prime characteristic.” — Friedrich Schlegel, Ideas

“Even in the bleakest of circumstances, creativity remains possible. It is possible in everything you do, including activities that seem completely rigid and mechanical.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/creati...

“In order for this world to have any importance, in order for our undertaking to have a meaning and to be worthy of sacrifices, we must affirm the concrete and particular thickness of this world and the individual reality of our projects and ourselves.” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.” — Michel de Montaigne, Essais

“I see a poem as a multicolored strip behind peeling plaster, in separate shining segments. I try to connect hands and horizons, glances and the objects imprisoned in them. That’s how it is in daylight. (1/2)

“The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways, but without materials from the external world it is powerless.” — Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“I see that an end to the cycle of suffering is possible only with greater awareness. I see that it is when I'm most attentive that I also understand how to act. I see that everything I do must be directed towards the needs of living beings.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/when-i...

“It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that revolution is in vain unless inspired by its ultimate ideal. Revolutionary methods must be in tune with revolutionary aims.” — Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia

“You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.” — Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

“Pure orientation towards the goal deprives the in-between space of all meaning, emptying it to become a corridor without any value of its own. … The rich meaning of the path disappears.” — Byung-chul Han, The Scent of Time

“The liberty of every individual is only the reflection of his own humanity, or his human right through the conscience of all free men, his brothers and his equals.” — Mikhail Bakunin, “Man, Society, and Freedom”

“We desperately want to bring about the causes that will produce the effect of satisfying our desire. That we can see this causal linkage so clearly and certainly is what makes it so easy for us to become attached.” Read more: suliqyre.substack.com/p/natural-de...

“Free yourself from common foolishness. This requires a special sort of sanity. Common foolishness is authorized by custom, and some people who resisted the ignorance of individuals were unable to resist that of the multitude.” — Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom

“I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.” — Albert Camus, The Plague

“Obedience, unconditional obedience, is the catch-word of tyrants of every description.” — Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“Doubts pile up, one on top of the other. But in this confused state of semi-wakefulness he has no tolerance for such thoughts. They seem to belong to another world and not this one.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/no-tim...

“Everyone acknowledges that there are vast amounts we do not know, and that enormous opportunities for progress in understanding lie before us. (1/2)

“Our political universe is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters; all it contains are absolutes and abstract entities.” — Simone Weil, “The Power of Words”

“When I’m writing, I feel again what is apparently the only paradoxical certainty: that what gets in the way of writing is having to use words.” — Clarice Lispector, Too Much of Life

“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.” — Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“The simple fact is that we are forced to live with a degree of injustice as long as the systems that produce and maintain injustices continue to exist. Our lives will not be fair, despite our belief that they should be.” Read more: suliqyre.com/posts/justic...

“Before abstraction everything is one — but it is one as chaos is — after abstraction everything is again unified — but this unification is a free alliance of independent, self-determined beings. A crowd has become a society — chaos is transformed into a manifold world.” — Novalis

“The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen, but, if one will, are to be lived.” — Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

“Impossible to imagine dying anywhere else than in the silence of the desert. Of all things, not to pass away amid sound and fury. To recover the only freedom, which is that of space and emptiness.” — Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V

“What is divine deserves our respect because it is good; what is human deserves our affection because it is like us.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (2.13)