“Alas, Siddhartha, I see you suffering, but you're suffering a pain at which one would like to laugh, at which you'll soon laugh for yourself.” ―Hermann Hesse

“It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much... The life we receive is not short but we make it so.” ―Seneca

“I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.” ―Simone de Beauvoir, La vieillesse

“Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.” ―Honoré de Balzac

“The essence of philosophy is not the possession of the truth but the search for truth. ... Philosophy means to be on the way. Its questions are more essential than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question.” ―Karl Jaspers

“The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.” ― Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“Science is continually correcting what it has said. Fertile corrections... Science is a ladder... Poetry is a winged flight... An artistic masterpiece exists for all time... Dante does not efface Homer.” ―Victor Hugo

“God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.” ―Pablo Picasso

"If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it." ―Charles Bukowski

“When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.” ―Hermann Hesse

“Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them. Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it.” ―Rabindranath Tagore

“Hapiness is as exclusive as a butterfly, and you must never pursue it. If you stay very still, it may come and settle on your hand. But only briefly. Savour those moments, for they will not come in your way very often.” ―Ruskin Bond

“There can be no whole without a thought which grasps it as a whole; and this grasping of what is before the mind as a whole can be effected only by a sort of voluntary halt in a kind of progressive movement of thought.” ―Gabriel Marcel

“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.” ―Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.” ―René Descartes

“No one can advise and help you, no one. There is only one way: go within.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke

“We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.” ―Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness, and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.” ―George Orwell, 1984

“Modern mass culture, aimed at the 'consumer', the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.” ―Andrei Tarkovsky

“We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe.” ―Henri Matisse