That land which is my home! Beautiful, calm- where there is no hurry to get anywhere, no driving to keep up in a race that knows no ending and no goal. No classes where men talk and talk, and then stop now and then to hear their own words come back to them from their own students. No constant peering into the maelstrom of one’s own mind; no worries about grades and honors; no hysterical preparing for life until life is half over; no anxiety about one’s place in the thing they call Society.
- Thomas S. Whitecloud (Chippewa) "Blue Winds Dancing"

You know that when I hate you, it is because I love you to a point of passion that infringes my soul.
-Julie de Lespinasse to Comte Hippolyte du Guibert
written in a love letter, 1774

I can forget my very existence in a deep kiss of you.... 
Byron Caldwell Smith to Kate Stephens, 1875

What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that it has a bearing upon our everlasting self which is poetry.
Matsuo Basho "Road to the Deep North"
 

O ME! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless--of cities fill'd with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who 
more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light--of the objects mean--of the struggle 
ever renew'd;
Of the poor results of all--of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around 
me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest--with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring--What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here--that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.
- Walt Whitman

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
- - - -William Butler Yeats
Click here for the Existentialists 

Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage 
must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and the 
Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever
again, this soil'd world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is 
dead, I look where he lies white-faced and still 
in the coffin- I draw near, Bend down and 
touch lightly with my lips the white face in the 
coffin. 
Walt Whitman "Reconciliation"

Consider this small dust, here in the glass, 
By atoms move'd:
Could you believe that this the body
Of that lov'd;
And in his mistress' flame playing like a fly,
Was turned to cinders by her eye:
Yes; and in death, as life unblest, 
To have't exprest,
Even ashes of lovers find no rest
-Ben Johnson "The Hour Glass"

"To distinguish the different forms of association we must trace the development successively of the association of the household, that of the village, and that of the city or polis. The polis, or political association, is the crown: it completes and fulfils the nature of man: it is thus natural to him, and he is himself naturally a "polis animal"; it is also prior to him, inthe sense that it is the presupposition of his true and full life"
- Aristotle "Politics"

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged
Missing me one place search another
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
- Walt Whitman 

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest,
Where can we find two better hemispheres
Without sharp North, without declining West?
What ever dies, was not mixed equally; 
If our loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.
-- John Donne " The Good Morrow"

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream 
Our path emerges for a while, then closes 
Within a dream.
-- Ernest Dowson

Some reckon their age by years,
Some measure their life by art;
But some tell their lives by 
the flow of their tears
And their lives by the moans of their hearts.
-- Abram Joseph Ryan

Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul
has her footing washed away, as the dark
flood rises.
We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying
and nothing will stay the death-flood rising
within us
and soon it will rise on the world, on the outside world.
We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying and our strength leaves us,
and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood, cowering in the last branches
of the tree of our life.
-- D.H. Lawrence From- " The Ship of Death"

Therefore the love which us doth bind,
But fate so enviously debars, 
Is the conjunction of the mind, 
And the opposition of the stars.
-- Andrew Marvell From- " Definition of Love"

O, how her eyes did lend and borrow!
Her eye seen in tears, tears in her eye; 
Both crystals, where they view'd each other's sorrow,
Sorrow that friendly sighs sought still to dry; 
But like a stormy day, now wind, now rain,
Sighs dry her cheeks , tears make them wet again
- William Shakespeare "Venus and Adonis"

"As soon as there will exist for everyone a margin of real freedom beyond the production of life, Marxism will have lived out its lifespan; a philosophy of freedom will take its place. But we have no means, no intellectual intrument, no concrete experience which allows us to concieve of this freedom or of this philosophy... "
Jean-Paul Sartre "Marxism and Existentialism"

"Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well being? Man is sometimes extraordinary, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky "Notes from the Underground"

When a great thinker despises men, it is their laziness that he depises: for it is on account of this that they have the appearance of factory products and seem indifferent and unworthy of companionship or instruction. The human being who does not wish to belong to the mass must merely cease being comfortable with himself; let him follow his conscience which shouts at him "Be Yourself! What you are present doing, opining, and desiring, that is not really you."....
-Friedrich Nietzsche "The Challenge of Every Great Philosophy"