"There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."
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"There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality."
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"But they used to take morphia and cocaine."
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"Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178."
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"Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug."
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"Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant."
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"All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects."
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"Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology."
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"Stability was practically assured."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"I suppose [my life] has most resembled a blue chip stock: fairly stable, more ups than downs, and gradually trending upward over time. A good buy, a lucky buy, and I've learned that not everyone can say that about his life."
— Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)

"There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music."
— John Keats

"Above all human existence requires stability, the permanence of things. The result is an ambivalence with respect to all great and violent expenditure of strength; such an expenditure, whether in nature or in man, represents the strongest possible threat. The feelings of admiration and of ecstasy induced by them thus mean that we are concerned to admire them from afar. The sun corresponds to that prudent concern. It is all radiance gigantic loss of heat and light, flame, explosion; but remote from men, who can enjoy in safety and quiet the fruits of this cataclysm. To earth belongs the solidity which sustains houses of stone and the steps of men (at least on its surface, for buried within the depths of the earth is the incandescence of lava)."
— Georges Bataille (Van Gogh As Prometheus)

"Cultivate and nourish yourself to enact maturity and achieve stability. If you accord everywhere with thorough clarity and cut off sharp corners without dependence on doctrines, you can be called a complete person."
— Hongzhi Zhengiue

"So much of what is best in us is bound up in our love of family, that it remains the measure of our stability because it measures our sense of loyalty."
— Haniel Long

"There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music. "
— John Keats