“The best teachers are those who show you where to look but don’t tell you what to see.”
Alexandra K. Trenfor
“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature…in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“It wasn’t the New World that mattered … Columbus died almost without seeing it; and not really knowing what he had discovered. It’s life that matters, nothing but life — the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Idiot
“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors … Perhaps I would have liked to be my father, who wrote and had the decency of not publishing. Nothing, nothing, my friend; what I have told you: I am not sure of anything, I know nothing … Can you imagine that I not even know the date of my death?”
Jorge Luis Borges
make it worth it
“There’s no reality except the one contained within us. That’s why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.”
Hermann Hesse
So little time we live in time,
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour’s term
To practice for Eternity.
Robert Penn Warren