High and Low

     "Even if fate did not permit of success: the striving in itself rewards the exertion of one's body" (619). — "If one accepts the burden as joy, there emerges a splendour for which even one's enemies are eager" (630).
— Attributed to the weaver Tiruvalliuvar, "Maxims" from the Kural, in Indian Thought and Its Development, Albert Schweitzer, p. 202.

     "The loveless man takes everything for himself; the man full of love gives even his own bones to others" (72). — .... "To assuage the deadly hunger of the poor is the treasury of the rich" (226). — "Wealth in benevolence is the wealth of wealths. Wealth in possessions the mob has also" (241).
— Ibid., p. 203.

.... "The wealth of him who gives nothing to the poor is as if a very fine lady grows old in solitude" (1007).
— Ibid., p. 204.

     Somehow I did [stand up for a head count, even after a severe beating], and that pertains to the second rule of survival burned into my mind: never admit the least sign of infirmity. A sore throat or a cough threatened to develop into something worse? A cut or wound or sore that might be protected against a fatal infection if you can scrounge up a piece of cloth? A back or leg injury that makes you stoop or limp? Don't improvise anything that the guards can spot as a makeshift bandage. Hide any mark of illness, no matter how serious or how slight. Remember that you live under the percept — however lunatic it may sound in a pit where all are condemned to destruction — that the weakest, and often the bravest and the best, go first....
— Samuel Pisar, Of Blood and Hope, p. 71.

     Life is so horribly ugly, we human beings so abysmally evil, that if a writer were to describe all that he had seen and heard no one could bear to read it. I can think of people I have known, good, respectable, popular people, who have said or done things that I have crossed out, things that I can never bring myself to mention and that I refuse to remember. Breeding and education seem to do no more than mask the beast in us, and virtue is a disguise. Our highest achievement is the concealment of our vileness.
     Life is so cynical that only a swine can be happy in it, and anyone who can see this hideous life as beautiful is a swine!
     Sure enough, life is a punishment! A hell. For some a purgatory, for none a paradise.
     We are absolutely forced to do evil and to torment our fellow men. It is all sham and delusion, lies, faithlessness, falsehood and self-deception. "My dear friend" is my worst enemy. Instead of "My beloved" one should write "My hated."
— August Strindberg, From An Occult Diary, September 3rd, 1904, [days before he started divorce proceedings from his wife], pp. 76-77.