Matthew Grech

“This pleasure came precisely from being too clearly aware of your own degradation; from the feeling of having gone to the uttermost limits; that it is was vile, bit it could not have been otherwise; that you could not escape, you could never make yourself into a different person”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet. In the practical life of the individual, we know how his whole gloom or glee about any present fact depends on the remoter schemes and hopes with which it stands related. Its significance and framing give it the chief part of its value. Let it be known to lead nowhere, and however agreeable it may be in its immediacy, its glow and gilding vanish. The old man, sick with an insidious internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and the knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and they turn to a mere flatness.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

“The mucky way is sweeter: everyone condemns it, but everyone goes down it, only they do it secretly, while I do it openly. And you see, it's because of my lack of dissembling that all the muck-dwellers have fallen upon me.”
― Fydor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the new-born baby to the child of five is an appalling distance.”
― Leo Tolstoy