He who has known the other days, the angry ones of gout attacks, or those with that wicked headache rooted behind the eyeballs that casts a spell on every nerve of eye and ear with a fiendish delight in torture, or soul-destroying, evil days of inward vacancy and despair, when, on this distracted earth, sucked dry by the vampires of finance, the world of men and of so-called culture grins back at us with the lying, vulgar, brazen glamor of a Fair and dogs us with the persistence of an emetic, and when all is concentrated and focused to the last pitch of the intolerable upon your own sick self—he who has known these days of hell may be content indeed with normal half-and-half days like today.

— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Thus in social media-driven politics, we find ourselves at the surfaces of things, feeding on apparent victories, enraged by apparent setbacks, ignorant of the real-world impact of what we are perceiving. But even when it is working as it should, politics is a competition more than it is a shared endeavor.

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought

Just don’t lie to yourself by conflating emoting about a problem and dealing with it. Because they are as different as sleeping and waking.

— Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way

It is plausible, if not inevitable, that we are more aware of the pain we suffer at the hands of others than of the pain that others suffer by our hands.

— Joshua D. Greene, Moral Tribes

Zen is like a man hanging in a tree by his teeth over a precipice. His hands grasp no branch, his feet rest on no limb, and under the tree another person asks him: “Why did Bodhidharma come to China from India?” if the man in the tree does not answer, he fails; and if he does answer, he falls and loses his life. Now what shall he do?

— The Mind’s I, Douglas R Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett