“None knows whence creation arose; And whether he has or has not made it; He who surveys it from the lofty skies. Only he knows—or perhaps not.”
— The Rigveda, Mandala 10, Hymn 129, Verse 6-7
“I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”
— Juan Ramón Jiménez, epigraph to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451
“People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”
— William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”
— Stanley Kubrick
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.”
— John Milton, Paradise Lost
“If winter comes, can spring be far behind?”
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”
“Whatever talents a person may posses to amuse and instruct others, be they ever so inconsiderable, he is yet bound to exert them”
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Preface to Prometheus Unbound
“No man is an island, but no men are a continent.”