One can promise actions, but not feelings, for the latter are involuntary. He who promises to love forever or hate forever or be forever faithful to someone is promising something that is not in his power.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
When it is stated in Genesis that God said to Adam, "Only from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you must not eat," it follows as a matter of course that Adam really has not understood this word, for how could he understand the difference between good and evil when this distinction would follow as a consequence of the enjoyment of the fruit?
Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Mark Twain
Anaïs Nin, A Literate Passion: Letters of Anais Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953
The dreamer—if you want an exact definition—is not a human being, but a creature of an intermediate sort. For the most part he settles in some inaccessible corner, as though hiding from the light of day; once he slips into his corner, he grows to it like a snail, or, anyway, he is in that respect very much like that remarkable creature, which is an animal and a house both at once, and is called a tortoise. Why do you suppose he is so fond of his four walls, which are invariably painted green, grimy, dismal and reeking unpardonably of tobacco smoke?
Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights
Well-meaning, helpful, good-natured attitudes of mind have not come to be honored on account of their usefulness, but because they are states of richer souls that are capable of bestowing and have their value in the feeling of the plenitude of life.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
There is something spectral about me – and this is both the good and the bad in me – something that makes it impossible for anyone to endure having to see me every day and thus have a real relationship with me. Of course, in the light cloak in which I generally show myself, it is another matter. But at home it would be noted that I fundamentally dwell in a spirit world.
Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Notebooks
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
I am like a winged creature who is too rarely allowed to use its wings. Ecstasies do not occur often enough.
Anaïs Nin
Perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
Inspiration— ... The idea of revelation in the sense that something becomes suddenly visible and audible with indescribable certainty and accuracy, which profoundly convulses and upsets one—describes simply the matter of fact. One hears—one does not seek; one takes—one does not ask who gives: a thought suddenly flashes up like lightning, it comes with necessity, unhesitatingly—I have never had any choice in the matter. There is an ecstasy such that the immense strain of it is sometimes relaxed by a flood of tears, along with which one’s steps either rush or involuntarily lag, alternately. There is the feeling that one is completely out of hand, with the very distinct consciousness of an endless number of fine thrills and quiverings to the very toes;—there is a depth of happiness in which the painfullest and gloomiest do not operate as antitheses, but as conditioned, as demanded in the sense of necessary shades of colour in such an overflow of light. There is an instinct for rhythmic relations which embraces wide areas of forms (length, the need of a wide-embracing rhythm, is almost the measure of the force of an inspiration, a sort of counterpart to its pressure and tension). Everything happens quite involuntarily, as if in a tempestuous outburst of freedom, of absoluteness, of power and divinity. The involuntariness of the figures and similes is the most remarkable thing; one loses all perception of what constitutes the figure and what constitutes the simile; everything seems to present itself as the readiest, the correctest and the simplest means of expression.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
One must see how no attack is so feared as that of laughter... because more than any other this attack isolates the one attacked.
Søren Kierkegaard
Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World
All respectable ants begin with the ant-hill, and they will probably end with it, too, which does great credit to their constancy and their positive character. But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself. And who knows (nobody can say with certainty), perhaps man's sole purpose in this world consists in this uninterrupted process of attainment, or in other words in living, and not specifically in the goal, which of course must be something like "two times two equals four" — that is, a formula; but after all, two times two equals four is not life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
I and me are always too deeply in conversation: how could I endure it, if there were not a friend?
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
In order to help another effectively I must understand more than he – yet first of all surely I must understand what he understands. If I do not know that, my greater understanding will be of no help to him. If, however, I am disposed to plume myself on my greater understanding, it is because I am vain or proud, so that at bottom, instead of benefiting him, I want to be admired.
Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View
When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
Mark Twain