Demitri felt that whatever might come later, whatever turn things might take, his final conflict with his father was close at hand, and must be decided before anything else.  With a sinking heart he expected before anything Greshenka's decision, always believing that it would come suddenly, on the impulse of the moment.  All of a sudden she would say to him: "Take me, I'm yours forever."  And it would all be over.  He would seize her and carry her away at once to the ends of the earth.  Oh, then he would carry her away at once, as far, far away as possible; to the furthest end of Russia, if not of the earth.  Then he would marry her, and settle down with her incognito, so that no one would know anything about them, there, here, or anywhere.  Then, oh then, a new life would begin.

There was a green meadow with a spring in the middle around the sauna.  She stayed in the sauna, and , looking at herself, she noticed that she was becoming uglier every day.  Because of her ugliness she didn't want to go to visit other people.  She then gave birth to a cat in the sauna.  She was about to kill it by squeezing it between the door and the doorframe, but the cat pleaded with her:  "Don't kill me, mother, before I make you happy!"

"Well, hopefully the lamp will work.  It sure is dirty!"  said the woman and started rubbing the lamp to burnish it.  Suddenly thick smoke poured forth and a genie could be seen within the cloud.

"You've freed me from centuries of captivity!" cried the genie.  "I was imprisoned in the lamp, and the only way I could escape was if someone rubbed the lamp.  Now that I am here, I am in your service, ready to do your bidding – I can deliver anything you crave."

This perversion of the truth, familiar to the artist though it was, always unnerved him afresh and proved too much for him. What was a consequence of the premature ending of his fast was presented as the cause of it! To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of non-understanding, was impossible.

A boy set out on the road.

There he saw two men fighting.  "Why are you fighting, my good men?"  They stopped and one said, "Our father died and left us a big inheritance.  It's all here."  He showed the estate: a hat, walking stick and birch-bark sandals, lying by the road.

"You're fighting over those paltry things?  I wouldn't even pick them up!"

"Oh no!  They are very precious things: put on those sandals and they will transport you wherever you desire; put the hat on and no one will see you; strike someone with the staff and they will disappear into thin air."

There was not only in me that legitimate disgust that seizes any normal man at the sight of a baby; there was not only that solid conviction that a child is a sort of vicious dwarf, innately cruel, who combines the worst features of the species, and from whom domestic pets keep a wise distance.  There was also, more deeply, a horror, an authentic horror at the unending calvary that is man's existence.  If the human infant, alone in the animal kingdom, immediately manifests its presence in the world through incessant screams of pain, it is, of course, because it suffers, and suffers intolerably.  Perhaps it's the loss of fur, which makes the skin so sensitive to variations in temperature, without really guarding against attacks by parasites; perhaps it's an abnormal sensitivity of the nervous system, some kind of design flaw.  To any impartial observer it appears that the human individual cannot be happy, and is in no way conceived for happiness, and his only possible destiny is to spread unhappiness around him by making other people's existence as intolerable as his own - his first victims generally being his parents.

He could not keep from constantly touching her comb, her ring, he fichu; sometimes he gave her great sounding kisses with all his mouth on her cheeks, or else little kisses in a row all along her bare arm from the tip of her fingers up to her shoulder, and she put him away half-smiling, half-vexed, as you do a child who hangs about you.

Before marriage she thought herself in love; but the happiness that should have followed this love not having once, she must, she thought, have been mistaken.  And Emma tried to find out what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.

I don't give a fuck if you don't know what I'm talking about – this is art.  When you go see a painting on the wall and it looks bugged out because you don't know what the fuck he thinking, because he ain't got no benches, no trees there, it's just a splash.  The nigga that did it knows what the fuck it is.

This woman, who was now fat and gross and ugly, fancied herself as the Viennese Viriginia Woolf, though everything she wrote was the most dreadful kitsch, and in her novels and short stories she never rose above a kind of loquacious, convoluted sentimentality.

The depressed person proposed now to take an unprecedented emotional risk and to begin asking certain important persons in her life to tell her straight out whether they had ever secretly felt contempt, derision, judgment, or repulsion for her,

Love God's people.  Because we have come here and shut ourselves within these walls, we are no holier than those that are outside, but on the contrary, from the very fact of coming here, each of us has confessed to himself that he is worse than others, than all men on earth . . . . And the longer the monk lives in his seclusion, the more keenly he must recognize this fact.  Else he would have had no reason to come here.  When he realizes that he is not only worse than others, but that he is responsible to all men for all and everything, for all human sins, national and individual, only then can the aim of our seclusion be attained.  For know, dear ones, that every one of us is undoubtedly responsible for all men and everything on earth, not merely through the general sinfulness of creation, but each one personally for all mankind and every individual man.  This knowledge is the crown of life for the monk and for every man.  For monks are not a special sort of men, but only what all men ought to be.  Only through that knowledge, our heart grows soft with infinite, universal, inexhaustible love.  Then one of you will have the power to win over the whole world by love and to wash away the sins of the world with your tears . . . . Each of you keep watch over your heart and confess your sins to yourself unceasingly.  Be not afraid of your sins, even when perceiving them, if only there be penitence, but make no conditions with God.  Again I say: Be not proud.  Be proud neither to the little nor to the great.  Hate not those who reject you, who insult you, who abuse and slander you.  Hate not the atheists, the teachers of evil, the materialists – and I mean not only the good ones – for there are many…

She was much more than that, she was beyond all that adolescent ranking and popularity crap, but I never really let her be or saw her as more, although I put up a very good front as somebody who could have deep conversations and really wanted to know and understand who she was inside

I know this part is boring and probably boring you, by the way, but it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part where I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person dies.

I am told that you raised your hand against yourself
Anticipating the butcher.
After eight years of exile, observing the rise of the enemy
Then at last, brought up against an impassable frontier
You passed, they say, a passable one.

Empires collapse. Gang leaders
are strutting about like statesmen. The peoples
Can no longer be seen under all those armaments.

So the future lies in darkness and the forces of right
Are weak. All this was plain to you
When you destroyed a torturable body.

"They'll kill him."

…

"Well", said George, "you better not think about it."

Hiroo Onoda was an Imperial Japanese Army intelligence officer who fought in World War II and did not surrender at the war's end in August 1945. After the war ended, Onoda spent 29 years hiding in the Philippines until Norio Suzuki, a Japanese explorer and adventurer found him and relayed the message that the Emperor wanted him to come back to Japan

The understanding of wisdom and compassion – and the inherent tension between the two – is not to be resolved on a theoretical level, but to be experienced in one's own mind and body.  In this way one finds emptiness and compassion to be mutually supportive rather than mutually contradictory.

But cybernetics on the other hand, sees itself as forced to recognize that a general regulation of human existence is still not achievable at the present time. This is why mankind still has a function, provisionally, within the universal domain of cybernetic science, as a “factor of disturbance.” The plans and acts of men, apparently free, act as a disturbance. But very recently, science has also taken over possession of this field of human existence. It has taken up the rigorously methodical exploration and planning of the possible future of man as an active player. In so doing, it figures in all available information about what there is about mankind that may be planned.

The few active rebels should have the qualities of speed and endurance, be ubiquitous, and have independent sources of provisions.

But suppose that, as the body is being divided, a minute section-a piece of sawdust, as it were-is extracted, and that in this sense-a body 'comes away' from the magnitude, evading the division. Even then the same argument applies. For in what sense is that section divisible? But if what 'came away' was not a body but a separable form or quality, and if the magnitude is 'points or contacts thus qualified': it is paradoxical that a magnitude should consist of elements, which are not magnitudes. Moreover, where will the points be? And are they motionless or moving? And every contact is always a contact of two somethings, i.e. there is always something besides the contact or the division or the point.

Als God werkelijk bestond, had hij weleens wat meer aanwijzingen omtrent zijn opvattingen mogen geven, God was een bijzonder slechte communicator, zo'n mate van amateurisme zou in een professionele omgeving nooit zijn geaccepteerd.

The Hungarians speak a language no one understands.  It is said to be related to Finnish but the Finns do not understand it either.  They also have an authoritarian government that was elected in honest elections.  People read poems under authoritarian governments that come to power naturally, without honest elections, but under authoritarian governments that are elected in honest elections people do not read poems, because why.  Thereby Hungarian poets face a dilemma.  If they write their poems in Hungarian no one will understand them.  Neither will Hungarians understand them, because they live under an authoritarian government they elected in honest elections, making poetry pointless, nor will non-Hungarians understand them, because Hungarian is not a language anyone understands.  Therefore they write their poems in German.

Man is condemned to be free.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSSShAOKYfo

Rihanna - Consideration