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"From my brother Severus, to love my kin, and to love truth, and to love justice; and through him I learned to know Thrasea, Helvidius, Cato, Dion, Brutus; and from him I received the idea of a polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech, and the idea of a kingly government which respects most of all the freedom of the governed; I learned from him also consistency and undeviating steadiness in my regard for philosophy, and a disposition to do good, and to give to others readily, and to cherish good hopes, and to believe that I am loved by my friends; and in him I observed no concealment of his opinions with respect to those whom he condemned, and that his friends had no need to conjecture what he wished or did not wish, but is was quite plain." (1.14)

Marcus Aurelius | Meditations

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"If it is not right, don't do it; if it is not true, don't say it" (12.17)

Marcus Aurelius | Meditations

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"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference" - Reinhold Niebuhr

[From the Introduction to Meditations Published by Chartwell Books]

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"I'm not a snob, as well you know, I went to grammar school, come from working-class stock and believe in egalitarianism über alles, not to be confused with being a communist, of course, I know enough about Stalin and Mao to be disabused of any fantasy in that direction. At the same time, the truth is that hierarchies of power and privilege won't disappear, every historian knows this, it's innate to human nature and inherent in all societies in all eras and equally manifests in the animal kingdom, so I can't pretend otherwise. My job as a teacher is to help those who are disadvantaged." - Shirley

Bernardine Evaristo | Girl, Woman, Other

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"Every breath we draw wards off the death that constantly impinges on us.. Ultimately death must triumph, for by birth it has already become our lot and it plays with its prey for a short while before swallowing it up. However, we continue our life with great interest and much solicititude as long as possible, just as we blow out a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible, although with the perfect certainty that it will burst."

Irvin D. Yalom | The Schopenhauer Cure

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"Man passes through the present with his eyes blindfolded. He is permitted merely to sense and guess at what he is actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can he glance at the past and find out what he has experienced and what meaning it has had."

Milan Kundera | Laughable Loves

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".. her conviction that the worth of a man lies in his ability to extend beyond himself, to go outside himself, to exist in and for other people."

Milan Kundera | Laughable Loves

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"They had begun to feel less like like memories and more like talons ripping at my entrails."

Susan Abulhawa | Against The Loveless World

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"Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it."

Ocean Vuong | On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

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"Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Watchmen - Chapter VI

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"It is the oldest ironies that are still the most satisfying: man, when preparing for bloody war, will orate loudly and most eloquently in the name of peace... Never before has man pursued global harmony more vocally while amassing stockpiles of weapons so devastating in their effect. The second world war - we were told - was The War To End Wars. The development of atomic bomb is the weapon To End Wars.

And yet wars continue.."

Alan Moore | Watchmen - DC Comics

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" Freedom as a given seems the very antithesis of death. While we dread death, we generally consider freedom to be unequivocally positive. Has not the history of Western civilisation been punctuated with yearnings for freedom, even driven by it? Yet freedom from an existential perspective is bonded to anxiety in asserting that, contrary to everyday experience, we do not enter into, and ultimately leave, a well-structured universe with an eternal grand design. Freedom means that one is responsible for one's choices, actions, one's own life situation."

Irvin D. Yalom | Love's Executioner (Prologue)

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"I have found that four givens are particularly relevant to psychotherapy: the inevitability of death for each of us and for those we love; the freedom to make our lives as we will; our ultimate aloneness; and, finally, the absence of any obvious meaning or sense to life. However grim these givens may seem, they contain the seeds of wisdom and redemption."

Irvin D. Yalom | Love's Executioner (Prologue)

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"I have found that four givens are particularly relevant to psychotherapy: the inevitability of death for each of us and for those we love; the freedom to make our lives as we will; our ultimate aloneness; and, finally, the absence of any obvious meaning or sense to life. However grim these givens may seem, they contain the seeds of wisdom and redemption."

Irvin D. Yalom | Love's Executioner (Prologue)

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*The Gestalt Prayer* was written by Fritz Perls to encapsulate Gestalt therapy. It emphasizes the importance of living according to our own needs, and not seeking fulfilment through others: "I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful. If not, it can't be helped."

The Psychology Book | DK publication

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"We need revolutionary government, we need (for a certain transitional period) a state. This is what distinguishes us from the anarchists. The difference between the revolutionary Marxists and the anarchists is not only that the former stand for centralized, large-scale communist production, while the latter stand for disconnected small production. The difference between us precisely on the question of government, of the state, is that we are for, and the anarchists against, utilizing revolutionary forms of the state in a revolutionary way for the struggle for socialism."

V.I. Lenin | Letters from Afar - Third letter

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“whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all its beauty, who has been, is, and always will be beautiful— is Truth.” -Tolstoy