"Keep your face always toward the sunshine, and shadows will fall behind you.” ~ Walt Whitman

“What is to give light must endure burning.” ~ Viktor Frankl

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” ~ Haruki Murakami

"If you look for a meaning, you’ll miss everything that happens." ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

We are what we think. 
All that we are arises with our thoughts. 
With our thoughts we make the world. 
Speak or act with an impure mind 
And trouble will follow you 
As the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.

We are what we think. 
All that we are arises with our thoughts. 
With our thoughts we make the world. 
Speak or act with a pure mind 
And happiness will follow you 
As your shadow, unshakable. 
How can a troubled mind 
Understand the Way?

Your worst enemy cannot harm you 
As much as your own thoughts, unguarded.

But once mastered, 
No one can help you as much, 
Not even your father or your mother.

~ The Buddha as recorded in the Dhammapada

“Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.” ~ Irvin D. Yalom

“Such wounds to the heart will probably never heal. But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.” ~ Haruki Murakami , 1Q84

"There are sins so flattering that, if I confessed them, I would commit another one of pride" ~ Antoine de Rivarol

"Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance." ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

"Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are the tormented souls." ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

"In the absence of huge suffering, the smallest inconveniences torture us." ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

"A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free." ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

"I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage." ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

"The horror of existence stares us blank in the face and we sense, in one devastating blow, that all souls are hanging by their own web and that a hellish abyss lurks beneath." ~ Peter Wessel Zapffe

” The apocalypse is imminent. We beasts have known it for a long time, and we all know it. Behind the party bickering, the armament and disarmament debates, the military parades and anti-war marches, behind the facade of the desire for peace and the endless ceasefires, there is a secret agreement, an unspoken great understanding: that we must put an end to ourselves and those like us, as soon as and so thoroughly as possible — without quarter, without scruples and without survivors.” ~ Ulrich Horstmann

” The true Garden of Eden — that is the wasteland. The goal of the story — is the weathered field of ruins. The sense — that is the trickling sand blown through the eye sockets under the skull cap.” ~ Ulrich Horstmann

“The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don’t know where that elsewhere is.” ~ Emil Cioran

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. ~ Ernest Hemingway

“It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.” ~ Oscar Wilde

There's probability, plausibility, and actuality. Luck is superstition. Luck is lazy math. ~ Billions

Somebody asked me: "What do you do? How do you write, create?" You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks, you make a pet out of it." ~ Charles Bukowski

“Mass Propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.” ~ Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951