People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.

But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.

Everything you and I do, we do either out of our need to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure.

are there really people on this earth who deliberately set out to do evil things? Who say to themselves, I want to hurt people, to inflict all the pain I can, to make their lives impossible?

We will often do anything to pretend that nothing is on our minds.

It is normal human behavior to want to stop feeling pain, whether physical or emotional, and people will find ways to do so. Sometimes that will mean getting help, and sometimes it will mean getting hooked on heroin. Our job is not to punish our friends and family members and neighbors by throwing them in prison. It is to put them on a sustainable path to better manage their pain.

So many people choose to take pain as a way of life; there’s people who live a painful life in order to punish other people who they don’t want to be happy. To me it’s really about the choices you make in your life.

When we're suffering, may of us are better at causing pain than feeling it. We spread hurt rather than let it inside.

I always had a desire to inflict pain on others and to have others inflict pain on me.

To avoid pain, they avoid pleasure. To avoid death, they avoid life.

Pain is an inextricable thread in the fabric of life, and to tear it out is not only impossible, but destructive: attempting to tear it out unravels everything else with it. To try to avoid pain is to give too many fucks about pain. In contrast, if you're able to not give a fuck about the pain, you become unstoppable.

Now since man is naturally inclined to avoid pain — and since labor is pain in itself — it follows that men will resort to plunder whenever plunder is easier than work.

When we deny ourselves the ability to feel pain for a purpose, we deny ourselves the ability to feel any purpose in our life at all.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.