/lit/ - Literature

>>18131457
You first.

>The condition of Ignorance is so wretched, that notwithstanding she is neither fair, good, nor wise, yet she thinks she has no need of any kind of amendment or improvement. So that the ignorant, not imagining themselves in need, neither seek nor desire that which they think they want not.
—Plato, Symposium

“With Ignorance wage eternal war, to know
thy self for ever strain,
Thine ignorance of thine ignorance is thy
fiercest foe, thy deadliest bane;
That blunts thy sense, and dulls thy taste; that
deafs thine ears, and blinds thine eyes;
Creates the thing that never was, the Thing
that ever is defies.”

— Sir Richard Burton, The Kasidah

"Every man makes his own Fate; and nothing is truer than the saying that "Character is Destiny. For that which in one existence is Will, becomes in the next Fate. By the hands of men themselves, then, are their natal lines cast, whether in pleasant and virtuous, or in painful and vicious paths. For in what manner soever an ego conducts itself in one existence, by that conduct, by that order of thought and habit it builds for itself its destiny in a future existence"
The Virgin of the World, trans. by Anna Kingsford, pp. 142–43

"Each man is his own absolute law-giver, the dispenser of glory or gloom to himself; the decree of his life, his reward, his punishment."
Excerpted from bk. 2, ch. 8 of The Idyll of the White Lotus by Mabel Collins.