“All man’s troubles come from not knowing how to sit still in one room.”
Blaise Pascal
“I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.”
John Stuart Mill
Jean-Léon Gérôme - Duel After a Masquerade Ball
via wikipedia
“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”
Oscar Wilde
Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon
He is probably best remembered for a remark he supposedly made to a friend one evening just before the outbreak of the First World War, as he watched the lights being lit on the street below his office: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.”
Sylvia Plath
“It was a marvelous night, the sort of night one only experiences when one is young. The sky was so bright, and there were so many stars that, gazing upward, one couldn’t help wondering how so many whimsical, wicked people could live under such a sky.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.”
Ernest Hemingway
He did not believe one could either number all the miseries of mankind, or sufficiently deplore any one of them.
…he observed that no state is so wretched, that it may not get worse; and that no mortal, however unhappy he may be, can console or flatter himself, by saying that he is in such an unhappy state that it can grow no greater. Even though hope has no limits, the blessings of mankind are limited; indeed the rich and poor, the master and the servant, if we balance up the difference in their estates with familiarity and their diverse aspirations, generally have the same quantity of good things. But nature has set no limits to our ills; and even the imagination is unable to visualize any tremendous calamity, that is not now coming to pass, or has not already come to pass, or finally may not come to pass, for some one of our species. Therefore, whereas the greater part of mankind has in truth no hope of any increase in the quantity of good which they possess; no one ever in the course of this life can be without reason for fear: and if fortune soon declines so much that she really has no power to benefit us further, she does not therefore at any time lose the ability to afflict us with fresh injures, such as to break and vanquish even the fortitude of despair.
…
Asked for what purpose men are born, he replied in jest: to learn how much more expedient it is, not to be born.
Leopardi
