"Hamlet's fate is a riddle to which there is no answer. It is the story of a man whose will to truth is without limit; but it cannot point out the just, the good, and the true as such. The drama ends in silence."
Karl Jaspers
Tragedy is not enough
anthologialitt.com/post/karl…
“I am a forest, and a night of dark trees; but he who is not afraid of my darkness will find banks full of roses beneath my cypresses.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas themselves that are dear to us, but our self-esteem."
James H. Robinson
"The courage to stand alone as if others didn't exist and think only of what you're doing. Not to get scared if people ignore you. You have to wait for years, have to die. Then after you're dead, if you're lucky, you become somebody."
Cesare Pavese
#DOTD 27 August 1950
For John Keats’ birthday, here again is (in the words of Harold Bloom) “one of the subtlest and most beautiful of all Keats's odes, and as close to perfect as any shorter poem in the English language”, “To Autumn”.
“I was terrified to find myself in the midst of nothingness, and myself nothing. I felt as if suffocated with the thought and feeling that all is nothing, just nothing.”
Leopardi
Zibaldone
"I believe there is a theory that men and women emerge finer and stronger after suffering, and that to advance in this or any world we must endure ordeal by fire."
Daphne du Maurier
Rebecca
#botd in 1907
Le Soleil moribond s’endormir sous une arche,
Et, comme un long linceul traînant à l’Orient,
Entends, ma chère, entends la douce Nuit qui marche.
Charles Baudelaire, Recueillement
“How many people eat, drink, and get married; buy, sell, and build; make contracts and attend to their fortune; have friends and enemies, pleasures and pains, are born, grow up, live and die ― but asleep !”
― Joseph Joubert
"Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined."
Baruch Spinoza
Ethics
November 24, 1632
February 21, 1677