Sensual pleasure passes and vanishes, but the friendship between us, the mutual confidence, the delight of the heart, the enchantment of the soul, these things do not perish and can never be destroyed.
Voltaire

Happy Birthday, Voltaire

“Dare to think for yourself”

I’m a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires
F. Scott Fitzgerald

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.
Ernest Hemmingway

I don’t know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream.
Vincent Willem van Gogh

I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again.
Miranda July

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.
Arthur O’Shaughnessy

Like most others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.
Hunter S Thompson, The Rum Diary

We need more light about each other. Light creates understanding, understanding creates love, love creates patience, and patience creates unity.
Malcolm X

The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
David Foster Wallace

When I was a child my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll be the pope.’ Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.
Pablo Picasso 

Happy,” I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception – especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong.
Hunter S Thompson, The Rum Diary