"She felt very young;
at the same time unspeakably aged"
- Virginia Woolf

I'll post quotes from each chapter I'm done with. It might take me a while as I am trying to get out of my reading block.

"In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way"

"'Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?' he said, looking round the table. 'Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls – which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.
Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think?"

"Aristotle says in the Poetics that objects such as corpses, painful to view in themselves, can become delightful to contemplate in a work of art."

"'Death is the mother of beauty,'
'And what is beauty?'
'Terror'
'Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory.
Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.'
'And if beauty is terror then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?'
'To live'
'To live forever'"

"'Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely."

"'Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?' he said. 'It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?"

"Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.'"

"'Trees are schizophrenic now and beginning to lose control, enraged with the shock of their fiery new colors. Someone – was it van Gogh? – said that orange is the color of insanity. Beauty is terror. We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.'"

"أُنادي الرَسمَ لَو مَلَكَ الجَوابا
وَأُجزيهِ بِدَمعِيَ لَو أَثابا
وَقَلَّ لِحَقِّهِ العَبَراتُ تَجري
وَإِن كانَت سَوادَ القَلبِ ذابا
سَبَقنَ مُقَبِّلاتِ التُربِ عَنّي
وَأَدَّينَ التَحِيَّةَ وَالخِطابا"
- أحمد شوقي

قال رسول الله صلى اللهُ عليهِ وسلم: {المُجاهد من جاهدَ نفسهُ في طاعة الله}

كتاب معاني الأذكار للشيخ محمد صالح المنجد