"Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him." - Fyodor Dostoevsky Art by Ricardo Fernandez Ortega

"The Devil is not a monster waiting to trap us, he is a voice inside. Look for the Devil in yourself, not in others. Don't forget that the one who knows his Devil, knows his God." -Shams Tabrizi

Artist: unknown

"Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it." - Baltasar Gracin

"Her whole person gives off a scent of fern and iris." - Colette, from The Complete Claudine; “Claudine Married,”

"My heart is so small it's almost invisible. How can You place such big sorrows in it? "Look," He answered, "your eyes are even smaller, yet they behold the world." - Rumi Art by Alejandro Pasquale

"I want to be conscious of nothing but darkness, nakedness, and the vain, silent struggle to hold myself back one minute, just one minute longer, on the edge of delight." - Colette, from The Complete Claudine; “Claudine Married,”

Art by Takato Yamamoto

"There’s so much I haven’t told her lately, about how quickly my soul is aging, how it feels like a basement I keep filling with everything I’m tired of surviving." - Philip Schultz, from The God of Loneliness: Selected and New Poems; “It’s Sunday Morning in Early November,” Art by Jorge Mascarenhas

"She is paler than the dead; her lips are pursed her green eyes are wild her clothes shine, her bracelets ring delicately at her every move like a secret, like a dream, like the earth’s first mother Lilith." - Anna Akhmatova, tr. by Richard McKane, from “Michal,”

"Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when it's the only one we have." - Émile Chartier Alain Art by Len Yan

"The pain is stronger than ever. I’ve seen bit of lost Paradises and I know I’ll be hopelessly trying to return even if it hurts. The deeper I swing into the regions of nothingness the further I’m thrown back into myself, each time more and more frightening depths below me, until my very being becomes dizzy. There are brief glimpses of clear sky, like falling out of a tree, so I have some idea where I’m going, but there is still too much clarity and straight order of things, I am getting always the same number somehow. So I vomit out broken bits of words and syntax's of the countries I’ve passed through, broken limbs, slaughtered houses, geographies. My heart is poisoned, my brain left in shreds of horror and sadness. I’ve never let you down, world, but you did lousy things to me." - Jonas Mekas

"Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler." - Friedrich Nietzsche Art by @EllenMarieArt

"And so we touched, and maybe our breathing together was some kind of heavenly conversation in God’s delicate and magnifying language, the one we don’t dare speak out loud, not yet." - Mary Oliver, from What Do We Know: Poems And Prose Poems; “The Return,”

"The gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again." - The Iliad, Homer

"I have a million things to talk to you about. A million things we have to talk about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning." — Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

"Do you know what the good part is, Arthur, darling? You cannot make me un-want you. You can try but you are doomed to fail. You can try your best and it will still amount to zero because you cannot force me. You cannot force me into not wanting you." - Edna St. Vincent Millay, from a letter to Arthur Davison Ficke featured in Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay

"It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake." - Frederick Douglass

Art by Nell Fallcard

"And yet at the same time - if you can understand it - you were dearer to me than ever, and I stroked your forehead and kissed your hair, and at that moment my love for you was both tender and sad." - Eyes Wide Shut (1999) dir. by Stanley Kubrick Still from Requiem for a Dream, dir. by Darren Aronofsky