A hundred times I was upon the point of killing myself; but still I loved life. This ridiculous foible is perhaps one of our most fatal characteristics; for is there anything more absurd than to wish to carry continually a burden which one can always throw down? to detest existence and yet to cling to one’s existence? in brief, to caress the serpent which devours us, till he has eaten our very heart?

— Voltaire, Candide

…public school systems where students of all social classes were made to get up and march from room to room each hour at the sound of a bell, an arrangement self-consciously designed to train children for future lives of paid factory labor.

— David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

…if you include the very people who will be affected in your decision-making process, change management becomes unimportant.

— Jim Whitehurst and Gary Hamel, The Open Organization

I saw that Haller was a genius of suffering and that in the meaning of many sayings of Nietzsche he had created within himself with positive genius a boundless and frightful capacity for pain. I saw at the same time that the root of his pessimism was not world-contempt but self-contempt; for however mercilessly he might annihilate institutions and persons in his talk he never spared himself. It was always at himself first and foremost that he aimed the shaft, himself first and foremost whom he hated and despised.

— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

It is no disgrace for one striving for first place to stop at second or third. Among poets… there is room not only for Homer. And in philosophy, I am sure, the magnificence of Plato did not deter Aristotle of writing, and nor did the later, with all his breadth of knowledge, put an end to the studies of others.

— Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Orator