Show, Don't Tell:

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

-- Anton Chekhov

Happiness is Relative:

Happiness is relative isn't it? Wherever you were happiest becomes the measure for where you are now. If you were happier in some previous place, you despair of ever living there again. If you return, you may find that it's not the same. What made you happy there previously, is now gone. Or you're not the same person.

Your best hope for ever increasing happiness is to start out somewhere really bad, like a homeless shelter. Then, anywhere you go will surely be better. 

Love:

We loved like an electric chair, hooked up to a nuclear power plant and plugged into the sun, and everything we did had never been done.

 --Shane Koyczan

The Bet:

Have you read The Bet by Anton Chekhov? It's a short story. At the beginning, the characters are discussing the death penalty and whether it should banned and replaced with life imprisonment as the punishment for murder:

The majority of the guests, among whom were many journalists and intellectual men, disapproved of the death penalty. They considered that form of punishment out of date, immoral, and unsuitable for Christian States.

However, the host of the gathering disagreed. His view was that life imprisonment was crueler because it's a long drawn out form of execution. To prove his point, he offers this bet:

I'll bet you two million you wouldn't stay in solitary confinement for five years."

"If you mean that in earnest," said a young man, "I'll take the bet, but I would stay not five but fifteen years."

And the bet is accepted. The terms of the bet are that the young man can leave confinement at any time, but will forfeit the two million dollars if it is before 15 years have elapsed. Towards the end of the term of confinement, the young man begins to despise god as seen in this passage that he wrote to the supreme deity:

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth.

I don't understand his logic though or the ending of the story. There's something I'm missing. What do you think it is? You can read it online for yourself at this link.

Remember How We Forgot?

 This is one of my favorite poems by Shane Koyczan:

Remember how we used to bend reality like we were circus strongmen?
Like our imaginations were in shape then.
Like we were all ninjas trained in the deadly art of "did not."
I totally got you.
Did not.
Remember how we forgot?

Living in a dream, but whose?

I live in my dreams — that’s what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That’s the difference. -Demian, Hermann Hesse

Demian:

Hermann Hessee most famous work is a novella about the life of Siddhartha, which I enjoyed. He also has another well known novella, entitled  Demian, which posed a question that continues to puzzle me.

In story of the resurrection of Christ, Demian asked whether the thief that was crucified with Jesus and repented should be admitted to heaven. Demian thought the thief that died resolute, asking forgiveness of no one, was the better man. The thief that repented had nothing to lose at that point and everything to gain by repenting, so of course he would have repented.

Demian argued it was the other thief that we should admire, for going stoically towards his fate. That's how heroes die.