"…there's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter of common decency. That's an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is - common decency."
— Albert Camus

"The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness."
— Albert Camus (The Plague)

""Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.""
— Milan Kundera (Immortality)

"My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.
"
— Richard Adams (Watership Down: A Novel)

"In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?"
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Another image comes to mind: Nietzsche leaving his hotel in Turin. Seeing a horse and a coachman beating it with a whip, Nietzsche went up to the horse and, before the coachman’s very eyes, put his arms around the horse’s neck and burst into tears.

That took place in 1889, when Nietzsche, too, had removed himself from the world of people. In other words, it was at the time when his mental illness had just erupted. But for that very reason I feel his gesture has broad implications: Nietzsche was trying to apologize to the horse of Descartes. His lunacy (that is, his final break with mankind) began at the very moment he burst into tears over the horse."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"A single metaphor can give birth to love."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman)."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"'I am not an angel,' I asserted; 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.' -Jane Eyre"
— Charlotte Brontë

"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Duino Elegies)

"If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke)

"The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable."
— Nietzche

"As long as you still experience the stars as something "above you", you lack the eye of knowledge."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power. If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich."
— Laozi (Tao Te Ching)

"To lead people, walk beside them ...
As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence.
The next best, the people honor and praise.
The next, the people fear; and the next, the people hate ...
When the best leader's work is done the people say,
'We did it ourselves!'""
— Laozi (Tao Te Ching)

"It was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy."
— Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)

""No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.""
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly."
— Alice Munro (The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose)

"No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it."
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)