Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom? I am much afraid that nature is itself only a first custom, as custom is a second nature.
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion. And yet it is the greatest of our miseries. For it is that above all which prevents us thinking about ourselves and leads us imperceptibly to destruction.
Arthur Schopenhauer·1839Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.
Ralph Waldo Emerson·1841A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Petrarch·1336And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.
