Ode to Kaavya !

What do those immense, wide, far-flung open spaces hold in store? Is it not here, is it not in you that some boundless thought will be born, since you are yourself without end ? [1] The problem is not exactly simple: a man must have experienced through both his strength and his weakness. If we are to bear any grudge against illness and weakness, it is the fact that along with it, there decays the very instinct of recovery, which is the instinct of defense and of war in man. [2]

Human nature has its limits. It is able to endure a certain degree of joy, sorrow and pain, but becomes annihilated as soon as this is exceeded. The question, therefore is, not whether a man is strong or weak but whether he is able to endure that measure of his suffering. [3] Resistance is impossible, if one could only understand what it is all for, But that too is impossible. An explanation would be possible if it could be said that one has not lived as he is ought to. There is no explanation. Death, Agony ... What for ? [4] On one hand its very unlikely, on the other hand its perfectly natural. [5]

There are exceptions here too. Theft is a crime, but the man who commit it for extreme poverty, with no design, but to save his family from poverty, is he an object of pity or of punishment. [6]

A theory of sorts, the same one by which one consider that a single misdeed is permissible if the principal aim is right, a solitary wrong doing and hundred of good deeds,... a theory of sorts - dividing mankind, you see, into material and superior persons, that is persons to whom the law doesn't apply owing to their superiority, who makes laws for the most of mankind, the material, that is. [7]

But yes we never give up hope. More, we never lose, ever for an instant, the sense of honor and privilege in being member of society. [8]

One lives for many years, with small regular recuperation, in visible glory, honored by the world, yet in spite of that , troubled in spirits and all the more troubled because no one would ever take his trouble seriously. What comfort could he possibly need? What could he possibly wish for. [9] But everybody knows life isn't worth living. Deep down, one knows it perfectly well that it doesn't matter whether you die at thirty or at seventy, since in either case other men and women will naturally go on living, and for thousand years, but it takes all the strength to quiet ones heart to be rational. [10]

So a rocket fades, its sparks, having grazed their way into the night, surrender to it, dark descends, pour over the outlines of houses and towers; bleak hillsides soften and fall in. [11]

Soul and body, body and soul--how mysterious they are! There is animalism in the soul, and the body has its moments of spirituality. The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. Who could say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began? How shallow were the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists! And yet how difficult to decide between the claims of the various schools! Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or was the body really in the soul, as Giordano Bruno thought? The separation of spirit from matter is a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter is a mystery also. [12]

Index:

[1] Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
[2] Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche
[3] The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
[4] The Death of Ivan Ilych, Leo Tolstoy
[5] The Stranger, Albert Camus
[6] The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
[7] Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
[8] Animal Farm, George Orwell
[9] A Hunger Artist, Franz Kafka
[10] The Stranger, Albert Camus
[11] Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
[12] The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

The title of the post of taken from here. The text of the masters are taken out of context and I tried to change them as little as possible.