When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.

- Albert Camus, A Happy Death

Ecce Homo, 1925, Lovis Corinth

I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.

- Albert Camus, The Fall

Walter Bonatti ascending a face on Mont Blanc

When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.

- Albert Camus, The First Man

Riding with Death, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1988

The love boat has crashed against the everyday
You and I, we are quits
And there is no use listing mutual hurts, sorrows, and pains.

- Vladimir Mayakovsky, Selected Poems

Even the voice of conscience undergoes mutation.

- Stanisław Jerzy Lec, More Unkempt Thoughts

Richard Teschner

“How can anyone become a thinker if he does not spend at least a third of the day without passions, people and books?”

—Human, All Too Human, “The Wanderer and His Shadow,” §324.

Hyde Park Flowers, London

Black Death, 1900, Theodor Severin Kittelsen

Tomi Ungerer, 1961

Night, Yayoi Kusama, 1991

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.

- Carl Gustav Jung

Sgt. Duane T. Macbeth of I Company, 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, at the ready with his M1 Garand rifle in Beirut, Lebanon. July 1958.

Does buying books shape the economy or does buying the economy shape the books

"'Jeg er saa sulten at det piber i Tarmene mine', sagde Skrubben" (1900) - Theodore Theodor Severin Kittelsen

“It is not to everyone’s taste that truth should be called pleasant, but at least let no one believe that error becomes truth when it is called unpleasant.”

—Human, All Too Human, “The Wanderer and His Shadow,” §349 (edited).