“I walked along singing, for when I am happy I am always humming to myself like every happy man who has no friend or acquaintance with whom to share his joy.” — Dostoyevsky, White Nights
"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth" – Henry David Thoreau
“Love every leaf…Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day, and you will come at last to love the world with an all-embracing love. Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and untroubled joy. So do not trouble it, do not harass them, do not deprive them of their joy, do not go against God’s intent. Man, do not exalt yourself above the animals: they are without sin, while you in your majesty defile the earth by your appearance on it, and you leave the traces of your defilement behind you — alas, this is true of almost every one of us!” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Daniel Ellsberg: “How much of a role does the media actually play in this, in deceiving the public, and how difficult is it to deceive the public? I would say, as a former insider, one becomes aware: It’s not difficult to deceive them. First of all, you’re often telling them what they would like to believe — that we’re better than other people, we are superior in our morality and our perceptions of the world.”
https://theintercept.com/2023/06/16/daniel-ellsberg-pentagon-papers-dead/
If a book has survived through the course of thousand of years, longer than kings and their kingdoms, whole civilisations, cross-culturally and transnationally — it would be uninformed arrogance of epic proportions to dismiss it while proclaiming intellectual superiority.
Between Pride, Shame and Love –– throw in "Desire" as the impetus, and you have a recipe for perpetual meaningless chase for an object of worship that you cannot describe and can never ever attain; but the chase is exhilarating at least and it gives an illusory sense of meaning.
Ideals are judge, it's the mode of being judgemental –– loving the idea of love is not love because love is non-judgemental. Love is personal, comprised of feeling and experience. It cannot be an ideal. Ideals are hierarchical, love is not.
All writers live and will live in Dostoyevsky's shadow, always.
You can lie but your conscience would know.
People usually say that they will do things that they always wanted to do if they were to struck with a tragedy which limits the amount of time they have. Consider you have five minutes to live, what would you do? — and why does your arrogance not permit you to consider the fact that you may actually go insane from contemplating all the possibilities, so much so that you would just want it all to end instead of actually “living” in those five minutes? Consider this from Dostoyevsky:
“He said that those five minutes seemed to him to be a most interminable period, an enormous wealth of time; he seemed to be living, in these minutes, so many lives that there was no need as yet to think of that last moment, so that he made several arrangements, dividing up the time into portions—one for saying farewell to his companions, two minutes for that; then a couple more for thinking over his own life and career and all about himself; and another minute for a last look around. He remembered having divided his time like this quite well. While saying good-bye to his friends he recollected asking one of them some very usual everyday question, and being much interested in the answer. Then having bade farewell, he embarked upon those two minutes which he had allotted to looking into himself; he knew beforehand what he was going to think about. He wished to put it to himself as quickly and clearly as possible, that here was he, a living, thinking man, and that in three minutes he would be nobody; or if somebody or something, then what and where? He thought he would decide this question once for all in these last three minutes. A little way off there stood a church, and its gilded spire glittered in the sun. He remembered staring stubbornly at this spire, and at the rays of light sparkling from it. He could not tear his eyes from these rays of light; he got the idea that these rays were his new nature, and that in three minutes he would become one of them, amalgamated somehow with them. “The repugnance to what must ensue almost immediately, and the uncertainty, were dreadful, he said; but worst of all was the idea, ‘What should I do if I were not to die now? What if I were to return to life again? What an eternity of days, and all mine! How I should grudge and count up every minute of it, so as to waste not a single instant!’ He said that this thought weighed so upon him and became such a terrible burden upon his brain that he could not bear it, and wished they would shoot him quickly and have done with it.”
Same acts of tribal display of brute power; cross-culturally, trans-nationally, across centers of immense power: empires, autocracies and democracies.
“History never repeats itself. Man always does.” ― Voltaire
https://twitter.com/costofglory/status/1668985889521909760?s=20
Proust: “Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics” 
There is something very nefarious about technology which is able to hijack the visible-reality around you or at least let you control it at whim. Cheap dopamine loops are winning as is –– as we struggle in the current cyber-info-space. This is the next level of "simulacrum".
https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/1665806600261763072?s=20
“You thirst for life and yet you try to solve life's problems with muddled logic. And how tiresome, how impudent your outbursts are - and at the same time how frightened you are! You talk nonsense and are happy with it. You come out with insolent remarks, yet you constantly fear for the consequences and apologize. You assure us that you are afraid of nothing yet you come crawling for our approval. You assure us that your teeth are clenched and at the same time you crack jokes in order to amuse us. You know that your jokes are not very witty, but you're evidently satisfied with their literary merit. Perhaps you really have had to suffer at times, but you have no respect whatsoever for your suffering. There is even truth in you, but no integrity; out of the pettiest vanity you carry your truth to the marketplace to be paraded in public and put to shame…You really do want to say something, but from fear you conceal your last word, since you haven't the resolve to say it, only craven impudence. You boast of your consciousness, but all you do is vacillate, since although your brain is functioning your heart is darkened by depravity and without a pure heart there can never be full, authentic consciousness. And how importunate you are, how pushy, how pretentious! Lies, lies and more lies!”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
"When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul-then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness." — Fyodor Dostoevsky
"The Earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal." — Camille Paglia
“There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
“What is truth?” 
“I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.”
― Jean Paul Sartre nostr:note17g0uzfagm7rer6l3v5kj3suhxhfzv5fpr7hq3yyjj0tztzsee4aqzz3el6
“Man, the bravest of animals, and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far.” - Nietzsche