Michael

“Left to itself every literature will exhaust its vitality, if it is not refreshed by the interest and contributions of a foreign one. What naturalist does not take pleasure in the wonderful things that he sees produced by reflection in a mirror? Now what a mirror in the field of ideas and morals means, everyone has experienced in himself, and once his attention is aroused, he will understand how much of his education he owes to it.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Hell is other people, said Jean-Paul Sartre. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think he means you.”
― Andy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life

“I think I have the courage to doubt everything; I think I have the courage to fight everything. But I do not have the courage to know anything, nor to possess, to own anything. Most people complain that the world is so prosaic, that life isn't like a romantic novel where opportunities are always so favourable. What I complain of is that life is not like a novel where there are hard-hearted fathers, and goblins and trolls to fight with, enchanted princesses to free. What are all such enemies taken together compared to the pallid, bloodless, glutinous nocturnal shapes with which I fight and to which I myself give life and being.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

“Today, no one has time for feelings, they’re all out making money. The discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb…”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets