From the satisfaction of desire there may arise, accompanying joy and as it were sheltering behind it, something not unlike despair. РAndr̩ Gide, The Counterfeiters, 1925

The mark of highest originality lies in the ability to develop a familiar idea so fruitfully that it would seem no one else would ever have discovered so much to be hidden in it. – Goethe

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things. – George Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical