“You Can’t Betray Yourself Too Often, Or You Become Somebody Else.”

“Envy is nothing else but hatred, in so far as it is disposing a man to rejoice in another’s hurt, and to grieve at another’s advantage.”

— Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

Gennady Aygi, tr. by Peter France, from “The People Are a Temple.”

Charles Baudelaire, from The Flowers of Evil: Poems; "The Possessed,"

“Cerebral, bewitching, and heartless.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, describing Lou Andreas-Salomé, from a letter to Paul Rée written c. September 1879 (via violentwavesofemotion)

Naomi Shihab Nye, from You & Yours: Poems; "Stay," originally published in 2005

“I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, in age after age forever.”

— Rabindranath Tagore

“Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous, and unafraid version of you―and go after those things as if nothing else matters. Because, actually, nothing does.”

— George Saunders

Albert Camus, The Fall Originally published: 1956

“It is madness to hate all roses because you got scratched with one thorn.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupére 

“I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.”

—The Picture of Dorian Gray - O. Wilde