Zora Neale Hurston - "I have lived in many ways" 

"I have given myself the pleasure of sunrises blooming out of oceans, and sunsets drenching heaped-up clouds. I have walked in storms with a crown of clouds about my head and the zig zag lightning playing through my fingers. The gods of the upper air have uncovered their faces to my eyes. I have made friends with trees and vales. I have found out that my real home is in the water, that the earth is only my step-mother. My old man, the Sun, sired me out of the sea."
Zora Neale Hurston
The Sum of Life
"Great is he, who conquers the frightful. Sublime is he, who, while succumbing to it, fears it not."
Philosopher Schiller
"The art of living well and the art of dying well are one."
Epicurus
The Courage to Be and the Courage not to Be.
"To take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to be -- Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the powerlessness of man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity to vanity -- to feel these things and know them is to conquer them."
Bertrand Russell
"Freud was a hero. He descended to the Underworld and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone."
psychiatrist R. D. Laing
"A young shepherd I saw, writhing, gagging, in spasms, his face distorted, and a heavy black snake hung out of his mouth. Had I ever seen so much nausea and pale dread on one face? He seemed to have been asleep when the snake crawled into his throat, and there bit itself fast. My hand tore at the snake and tore in vain; it did not tear the snake out of his throat. Then it cried out of me; "Bite! Bite its head off! Bite!" Thus it cried out of me - my dread, my hatred, my nausea, my pity, all that is good and wicked in me cried out of me with a single cry.
The shepherd, however, bit as my cry counseled him; he bit with a good bite. Far away he spewed the head of the snake - and he jumped up. No longer shepherd. no longer human - one changed, radiant, laughing! Never yet on earth has a human being laughed as he laughed! O my brothers, I heard a laughter that was no human laughter; and now a thirst gnaws at me, a longing that never grows still. My longing for this laughter gnaws at me; oh, how do I bear to go on living! And how could I bear to die now!"