Quotes

"I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me. I'm always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling through a trapdoor, through infinite, infinitous space, in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool. And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am a centre that exists only because every circle has one."
- Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

"Fall seven times, stand up eight."
- Japanese Proverb

"Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be."
- Don Quixote

"The journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step."
- Lao Tzu

"Without music, life would be a mistake."
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

"He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Compassion is the basis of morality."
- Arthur Schopenhauer

"You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength."
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

"I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy."
- Franz Kafka

"Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy."
- Søren Kierkegaard

"The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have."
- Søren Kierkegaard

"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is."
- Albert Camus