“All suffering has an end.”

“When we are set free from the bondage of pleasing others, when we are free from currying others'approval-then no one will be able to make us miserable or dissatisfied. And then, if we know we have pleased God, contentment will be our consolation.”

“Suffering builds character and impels you to penetrate life’s secrets. It’s the path of great artists, great religious leaders, great social reformers. The problem is not suffering per se, but rather our identification with our own ego: our divided, dualistic, cramped view of things. ‘We are too ego-centered,’ Suzuki tells Cage.’ The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow. We seem to carry it all the time from childhood up to the time we finally pass away.”

“The poet makes himself a seer through a long, tremendous,planned detachment of all his senses. All the forms of love,of suffering, of madness; he himself seeks and in himselfexhausts all poisons, so as to keep only the quintessential.A self torture that takes all his faith, all his superhumanstrength, that makes him, among his fellow men, The SickMan, The Criminal, The Accursed, and The Supreme Sage!For he reaches the unknown! Because he has cultivated hissoul, rich already, more than anyone else and if maddenedin his pursuit, he should in the end lose all understandingof his. . . .”—Arthur Rimbaud”

“The best story in life, is your own.The only story that you truly lived and died for.”

“If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves; or there would be wars, massacres, and murders; so that in the end mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of Nature.”

“Wherever this shadowed path might lead, we were both irrevocably committed to follow it to the end.”