Pain and Despair

That which does not kill me makes me stronger.

The deeper the feeling, the greater the pain.

No stranger can get a great many notes of torture out of a human soul; it takes one that knows it well,—parent, child, brother, sister, intimate.

Odi et amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior .

 

Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.

Why love if losing hurts so much we love to know that we are not alone.

Discouragement is simply the despair of wounded self-love.

To be misunderstood even by those whom one loves is the cross and bitterness of life.

Odi et amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.

 

Someone asked Sophocles, “How is your sex-life now? Are you still able to have a woman?” He replied, “Hush, man; most gladly indeed am I rid of it all, as though I had escaped from a mad and savage master.”

It is in sickness that we are compelled to recognize that we do not live alone but are chained to a being from a different realm, from whom we are worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. . . . To ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.

The curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

Wearing all that weight

 

Real sorrow is incompatible with hope. No matter how great that sorrow may be, hope raises it one hundred cubits higher.

Talent is often to be envied, and genius very commonly to be pitied. It stands twice the chance of the other of dying in a hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute.

In despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one’s position.

Beauty more than bitterness / Makes the heart break.

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.

Man, is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.

There are no clear paths. Only pitfalls and tripwires and darkness.

 

Thoughts are tyrants that return again and again to torment us.

 

On the heights, all paths are paved with daggers.

 

Remorse: beholding heaven and feeling hell.