Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.

“Art is the reason I get up in the morning, but the definition ends there. It doesn’t seem fair that I’m living for something I can’t even define.”

--Ani DiFranco

“You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

--Jim Rohn

“There’s just some stuff I like, and some of that stuff is shallow, and I don’t fucking care.”

--Ryan Adams

“Don’t you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn’t the mirror hostile enough?”

--Jeanette Winterson

“I hate the idea that someone out there hates me. I even hate that Al-Qaeda hates me. I think if they got to know me they wouldn’t hate me.”

--Pam, 'The Office'

“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.”

--Woodrow Wilson

“The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you’re unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously.”

--Tom Robbins, 'Jitterbug Perfume'

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have."

--Steve Jobs

“There’s a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I can’t touch it.”

--Fernando Pessoa, 'The Book of Disquiet'

“I’d woken up early, & I took a long time getting ready to exist.”

--Fernando Pessoa, 'The Book of Disquiet'