“I want to tell you something today, something that I have known for a long while, and you know it too; but perhaps you have never said it to yourself. I am going to tell you now what it is that I know about you and me and our fate. You, Harry, have been an artist and a thinker, a man full of joy and faith, always on the track of what is great and eternal, never content with the trivial and petty. But the more life has awakened you and brought you back to yourself, the greater has you need been and the deeper the sufferings and dread and despair that have overtaken you, till you were up to your neck in them. And all that you once knew and loved and revered as beautiful and sacred, all the belief you once had in mankind and our high destiny, has been of no avail and has lost its worth and gone to pieces. Your faith found no more air to breathe. And suffocation is a hard death. Is that true, Harry? Is that your fate?”

— Hermann Hesse, The Steppenwolf

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and astonished.

— Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

— William Shakespeare, Macbeth

He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. “Where is it? What death?” There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light.

— Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

“Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be. He had wanted friendship and the closeness of friendship that might hold him in the race of mankind; he had had two friends, one of whom had died senselessly before he was known, the other of whom had now withdrawn so distantly into the ranks of the living that...

He had wanted the singleness and the still connective passion of marriage; he had had that, too, and he had not known what to do with it, and it had died. He had wanted love; and he had had love, and had relinquished it, had let it go into the chaos of potentiality. Katherine, he thought. "Katherine."

And he had wanted to be a teacher, and he had become one; yet he knew, he had always known, that for most of his life he had been an indifferent one. He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance. And what else? he thought. What else?

What did you expect? he asked himself.”

— John Williams, Stoner

“Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through.

If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.

Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.” 

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Creatures of a day. What is someone? What is no one? Man is the dream of a shadow.” 

— Pindar, The Odes

“What are we after all? What are we, if not masks? Everyone creates their own mask, without even realizing it, to show to the world, and we live in that mask, we change it, we mold it as we see fit. Yet behind this mask, what is left of us? Behind it, what is the truth? And can we ever know, for sure, what our real face is when we are so accustomed to seeing ourselves only through the eyes of others?”

— Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author

“The hyperreal represents a world in which nothing is real anymore, where reality itself has been replaced by simulations, by a reality that has no grounding in truth or authenticity.”

— Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”

— Jean-Luc Godard

“If just being born is the greatest act of creation, then… what are you supposed to do after that? Isn't everything that comes next sort of a disappointment? slowly entropying until we deflate into a pike of mush?”

“I do think that we suffer more if we resist the flow of the river.”

“I may leave this plane of existence sooner rather than later, but the love isn’t going anywhere.”

— Midnight Gospel

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it is tender and pliant. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.”

“We don’t want other worlds, we want mirrors. We struggle all our lives to achieve something, but when we get there we are lost. We perish in the moment of triumph.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

“People only have substance within the memories of other people. And that's why there were all kinds of mes. There weren't a lot of mes per se, I was just inside all sorts of people, that's all.”

— Serial Experiments Lain

“There is no meaning to life a priori. Life itself is absurd; it is we who invest it with meaning through our actions. We are abandoned in the world, thrown into existence without any preordained purpose. It is only through living authentically, by embracing the weight of our freedom and acting with intention, that we can transcend the absurdity and create meaning where there was none before.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

“People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.”

— Neil Gaiman, The Sandman

“Just like a murderer jumps out of nowhere in an alley, love jumped out in front of us and struck us both at once.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

"I never quite realized… how beautiful this world is."

— A2, Nier:Automata

"This is YoRHa unit 2B… If anyone is listening to this, there's something I need you to do. If you ever meet up with YoRHa unit 9S… I want him… I mean… I'm sorry. Please just give him the following message: 9S… the time I was able to spend with you… It was like memories of pure light. Thank you… Nine.. s..."

— 2B, Nier:Automata

“Pain and pleasure are inseparable. Everything you have loved has made you suffer, but suffering gives life a deeper meaning. It’s in those moments of pain that we discover the depth of our feelings, the real value of the people and things we hold dear. Without suffering, we’d float through life, never truly understanding how much we care. Pain grounds us, it reminds us that we are alive.”

— Pedro Almodovar, Pain and Glory

“Love is so great... So why does it have to go so wrong?”

— Hideyuki Kikuchi, Vampire Hunter D Volume 3: Demon Deathchase

“But this road doesn't go anywhere,” I told him.
“That doesn't matter.”
“What does?” I asked, after a little while.
“Just that we're on it, dude,” he said.”

— Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

“Man fears the darkness, and so he scrapes away at the edges of it with fire. He creates life by diminishing the Darkness.”

– Rei Ayanami, Neon Genesis Evangelion

“A lie is truth, until you recognize it as a lie. To see the truth behind those lies is probably the right thing to do. However, it may not necessarily bring happiness. Lies are happiness.”

– Ergo Proxy

“What we call beauty is perhaps the strength of our feeling of resistance to destructibility. Difficulty of reproduction is the yardstick of the degree of beauty.” 

“Loneliness—since I was trying to escape it—was hell; and yet for the hermit who seeks it, it is apparently happiness.” 

— Kobo Abe, The Face of Another

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”

— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“I know I want and do not have what I want. A weight hangs suspended from a hook; being suspended, it suffers because it cannot fall: it cannot get off the hook, for insofar as it is weight it suspends, and as long as it suspends it depends. [...] 

Its life is this want of life. If it no longer wanted but were finished, perfect, if it possessed its own self, it would have ended its existence. At that point, as its own impediment to possessing life, the weight would not depend on what is external as much as on its own self, in that it is not given the means to be satisfied. The weight can never be persuaded. 
Nor is any life ever satisfied to live in any present, for insofar as it is life it continues, and it continues into the future to the degree that it lacks life. If it were to possess itself completely here and now and be in want of nothing—if it awaited nothing in the future—it would not continue: it would cease to be life. 
So many things attract us in the future, but in vain do we want to possess them in the present.”

— Carlo Michelstaedter, Persuasion and Rhetoric

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

— Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Notebooks

“A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation, not on death, but on life.” 

— Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

“If we are in a general way permitted to regard human activity in the realm of the beautiful as a liberation of the soul, as a release from constraint and restriction, in short to consider that art does actually alleviate the most overpowering and tragic catastrophes by means of the creations it offers to our contemplation and enjoyment, it is the art of music which conducts us to the final summit of that ascent to freedom.”

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, On the Arts: Selections from G.W.F. Hegel's Aesthetics or the Philosophy of Fine Art

“The greatest evil is the indifference of good men.”

— Monster

“For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”

— George Orwell, 1984