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To Go It Alone
I think one can only teach the love of something. I have taught, not English literature, but the love of that literature…
— Jorge Luis Borges
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My reputation as a ladies’ man was a joke that caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone.
— Leonard Cohen
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Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
— William Butler Yeats
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Loneliness grants the man endowed with great intellectual qualities a double advantage: first, it gives him the possibility to be with himself; and second, not to be with others.
Arthur Schopenhauer. The art of living. 1851.
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This search for the meaning of life and the meaning of death is, however, inevitably closely tied up with the search for one’s own true self. No wonder that many should at first have shied away from such an awesome venture. For they might well have sensed that it would inevitably involve them in an increased exploration of their own inner world, a deeper knowledge of who and what they are, an expansion of consciousness and confrontation with their illusions, idealisations and shadow side. Ultimately it demands…
