"Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most."

Dostoevsky, Fyodor | Action | 7 bookmarks

"It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night."

Nietzsche, Friedrich | Suicide | 5 bookmarks

"At great periods you have always felt, deep within you, the temptation to commit suicide. You gave yourself to it, breached your own defenses. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death."

Pavese, Cesare | Suicide | 3 bookmarks

"If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will."

Artaud, Antonin | Suicide | 3 bookmarks

"Man could not live if he were entirely impervious to sadness. Many sorrows can be endured only by being embraced, and the pleasure taken in them naturally has a somewhat melancholy character. So, melancholy is morbid only when it occupies too much place in life; but it is equally morbid for it to be wholly excluded from life."

Durkheim, Emile | Sadness | 4 bookmarks

"Melancholy men are of all others the most witty."

Aristotle | Wit | 4 bookmarks

"Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits."

Sontag, Susan | Depression | 5 bookmarks

"Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. Patriotism is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by patriotism I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one's own nation, which is the concern with the nation's spiritual as much as with its material welfare --never with its power over other nations. Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship."

Fromm, Erich | Patriotism | 1 bookmarks

"The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds."

Jampolsky, Gerald G. | Belief | 3 bookmarks

"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

Adams, John | Democracy | 3 bookmarks