Quotes

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

 

This powerful quote is from Viktor E. Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” which was published in 1946. Frankl was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor. In the book, he recounts his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II and develops his theory of logotherapy, which posits that the primary motivational force in humans is the search for meaning in life.

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“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

 

This quote from Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” is one of the novel’s most poignant moments, capturing the essence of human yearning in the face of a dystopian society that has eradicated most forms of discomfort and suffering at the expense of individual freedom and genuine human experiences.

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“SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 1944 Dearest Kitty, The sun is shining, the sky is deep blue, there’s a magnificent breeze, and I’m longing — really longing — for everything: conversation, freedom, friends, being alone. I long… to cry! I feel as if I were about to explode. I know crying would help, but I can’t cry. I’m restless. I walk from one room to another, breathe through the crack in the window frame, feel my heart beating as if to say, “Fulfill my longing at last. . .” I think spring is inside me. I feel spring awakening, I feel it in my entire body and soul. I have to force myself to act normally. I’m in a state of utter confusion, don’t know what to read, what to write, what to do. I only know that I’m longing for something. . . Yours, Anne”

― Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank

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“We believe that we can change the things around us in accordance with our desires—we believe it because otherwise we can see no favourable outcome. We do not think of the outcome which generally comes to pass and is also favourable: we do not succeed in changing things in accordance with our desires, but gradually our desires change. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant to us. We have failed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us beyond it, and then if we turn round to gaze into the distance of the past, we can barely see it, so imperceptible has it become.”

– Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

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His hair was already beginning to turn grey. And it seemed strange to him that he had grown so much older, so much plainer during the last few years. The shoulders on which his hands rested were warm and quivering. He felt compassion for this life, still so warm and lovely, but probably already not far from beginning to fade and wither like his own. Why did she love him so much? He always seemed to women different from what he was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man created by their imagination, whom they had been eagerly seeking all their lives; and afterwards, when they noticed their mistake, they loved him all the same. And not one of them had been happy with him. Time passed, he had made their acquaintance, got on with them, parted, but he had never once loved; it was anything you like, but not love.

― Anton Chekhov, Lady with the Dog

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“You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.”

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Netochka Nezvanova

 

This quote from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Netochka Nezvanova” touches on a complex interplay of emotions and thoughts that many individuals experience at various points in their lives.

The character reflects on a deep, internal sense of dissatisfaction and a yearning for a different, presumably better, life path.

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“I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable–if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.”

― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

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And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say

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Lonni Jung: And what do you sacrifice?

Luthen Rael: Calm. Kindness, kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace, I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion: I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost, and by the time I looked down, there was no longer any ground beneath my feet.

What is… what is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life, to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. No, the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror, or an audience, or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice?

Everything.

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“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.”

— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

 

This quote is from Sylvia Plath’s novel “The Bell Jar,” which was published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. The novel is semi-autobiographical, blending elements of Plath’s own life and experiences with the fictional journey of the protagonist, Esther Greenwood. “The Bell Jar” is often hailed for its candid exploration of mental illness, identity, and the societal pressures on women in the 1950s.

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“You have to carry the fire.”

I don’t know how to.”

Yes, you do.”

Is the fire real? The fire?”

Yes it is.”

Where is it? I don’t know where it is.”

Yes you do. It’s inside you. It always was there. I can see it.”

― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

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