Charles Baudelaire, From The Flowers Of Evil: Poems; "The Possessed,"

Mikhail Kuzmin, from “The Summer’s Love,” featured in “A Treasury of Russian Verse,”

“I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, in age after age forever.”

— Rabindranath Tagore

“I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.”

— Franz Kafka 

The many wrongly addressed letters. Then the unsent ones. Followed by the unwritten ones. And at last — again — the poem: the breathed breve... a few syllables too long. — (Wave shorts. Wave troughs. No crests at all.)

– Paul Celan, trans. Pierre Joris

Trista Mateer, Honeybee

“It isn’t necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you.”

— Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms (via philosophybits)

“—I want to change: I want to stop fear’s subtle / guidance of my life—”

— Frank Bidart, from Half-light: Collected Poems; “California Plush”

Edith Sitwell, Fire of the Mind: The Complete Anthology of Edith Sitwell

William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

Constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want. - Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), German historian and philosopher