x"Whatever you set your mind to, your personal total obsession, this is what kills you. Poetry kills you if you’re a poet, and so on. People choose their death whether they know it or not."
— Don DeLillo

x"How far have you walked for men who’ve never held your feet in their laps?"
— Warsan Shire 

x"There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart."
— Jane Austen

x"We don’t want other worlds; we want a mirror.
We seek contact and will never achieve it."
— Andrei Tarkovsky, from Solaris (1972)

x"As long as some men use physical force to subjugate females, all men need not. The knowledge that some men do suffices to threaten all women."
— Marilyn French

x"Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth—look at the dying man’s struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment."
— Søren Kierkegaard 

x"In a society in which individualism is becoming rampant, people more and more believe that they are the center of the world. Such a belief system makes individual failure almost inconsolable."
— Martin Seligman

x"The fundamental terror that capitalism exploits is that we might not want anything."
— Adam Phillips 

x"The unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself."
— Søren Kierkegaard

x"[T]he hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don’t want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other. Larvatus prodeo: I advance pointing to my mask: I set a mask upon my passion, but with a discreet (and wily) finger I designate this mask."
— Roland Barthes, from A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments

x"You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting ‘Vanity,’ thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure."
— John Berger, Ways of Seeing

x"You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free."
— Thich Nhat Hanh