Within Quotes (page 88)
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Your suns and worlds are not within my ken, I merely watch the plaguey state of men. The little god of earth remains the same queer sprite. As on the first day, or in primal light. His life would be less difficult, poor thing, Without your gift of heavenly glimmering; He calls it Reason, using light celestial. Just to outdo the beasts in being bestial. To me he seems, with deference to Your Grace, One of those crickets, jumping round the place, Who takes his flying leaps, with legs so long,...
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, and the first fire and the last ever to be.
Cormac McCarthy
How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life...
Barry Lopez
The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? — how far? — how situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of...
Aldous Huxley
Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we...
Alain de Botton
Someone, somewhere, had tied up the darkness, he thought as he went: the bag of darkness had been tied at the mouth, enclosing within it a host of smaller bags. The stars were tiny, almost imperceptible perforations; otherwise, there wasn't a single hole through which light could pass.The darkness in which he walked immersed was gradually pervading him. His own footfall was utterly remote, his presence barely rippled the air. His being had been compressed to the utmost - to the point where it...
Yukio Mishima
O all you host of heaven! O Earth! waht else?
And shall i couple hell? O Fie! Hold, hold, my heart
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memmory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and...
William Shakespeare
Since time itself is not movement, it must somehow have to do with movement. Time is initially encountered in those entities which are changeable, change is in time. How is time exhibited in this way of encountering it, namely, as that within which things change? Does it here give itself as itself in what it is? Can an axplacation of time starts here guarantee that time will thereby provide as it were the fundamental phenomena that determine it in its own being?
Martin Heidegger
But whether I become a believer or remain an agnostic, my belief or disbelief must derive its source from within, not from without. I, myself, must create its symbols. The transcendental is that which produces its own form. I will never discover its secret if I do not find it in my own heart; if I do not possess it already I shall never be able to acquire it.
Oscar Wilde
...it is only when a man goes out into the world with the thought that there are heroisms all round him, and with the desire all alive in his heart to follow any which may come within sight of him, that he breaks away... from the life he knows, and ventures forth into the wonderful mystic twilight land where lie the great adventures and the great rewards.
Arthur Conan Doyle