I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself from above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man.
— Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy
We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent we have discovered afterward that much was accomplished and much was begun in us.
We could never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world
Where your fear is, there is your task.
There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
Refrain to-night; And that shall lend a kind of easiness / To the next abstinence, the next more easy; For use almost can change the stamp of nature, And either master the devil or throw him out / With wondrous potency.
— Hamlet
The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, omnipresent and unnoticed, which protect the growth of the young mind, and guide man's interpretation of his life and struggles.
— The Birth of Tragedy
Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.
— Great Expectations
What makes night within us may leave stars.
— Ninety-Three
Marianne could never love by halves; and her whole heart became, in time, as much devoted to her husband, as it had once been to Willoughby.
— Sense and Sensibility
Just fancy! One can hear and see the grass growing,' thought Levin, as he noticed wet slate-coloured aspen leaf move close to the point of a blade of grass.
— Anna Karenina
Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think
— Ideas and Opinions
We do all these things when we are young. The poise, the savoir faire, it comes later.
— Murder in Mesopotamia
I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.
— Demian. Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend
Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.
— The Essential Rumi
— Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
— The Time Machine
Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth.
— The Man In The Arena: Speeches and Essays by Theodore Roosevelt
Such is the strength of the burden of habit. Here I have the power to be but do not wish it. There I wish to be but lacks the power. On both grounds, I'm in misery.
— Confessions
There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.
— Confessions
Man's poverty is abysmal, his wants are endless till he becomes truly conscious of his soul. Till then, the world to him is in a state of flux - a phantasm that is and is not.
— Sadhana
Satori - in the awakening from a dream. Awakening and self-realization and seeing into one's own being - these are synonymous.
— Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living
For all bodies are in perpetual flux like rivers, and parts are passing in and out of them continually.
— Monadology
America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he chooses.