And it seems to me there’s so much strength in me now that I can overcome everything, all sufferings, only in order to say and tell myself every moment: I am! In a thousand torments—I am; writhing under torture—but I am. Locked up in a tower, but still I exist, I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, still I know it is. And the whole of life is there—in knowing that the sun is.
Sublime
"Who shall say how much of the eight years they have spent in that space there in front of the aperture, nursing their hope of rescue by that timid yet friendly ray of light? When the brightness came creeping in, they knew it was dawn; when it began to fade, they knew the world was hushing for the night, which could not be anywhere so long and utterly dark as with them. The world! Through that crevice, as if it were broad and high as a king's gate, they went to the world in thought, and passed the weary time going up and down as spirits go, looking and asking, the one for her son, the other for her brother." ("Ben-Hur")
'"Look at that ray of sunlight shining through my window,' said the abbe. 'Now look at the lines I have drawn on the wall. Thanks to these lines, which take account of the double movement of the earth and its course round the sun, I know the time more accurately than if I had a watch, because the mechanism of a watch may be damaged, while that of the earth and the sun never can.' Dantes understood nothing of this explanation: he had always thought, seeing the sun rise behind the mountains and set in the Mediterranean, that it moved, and not the earth. He considered almost impossible this 'double movement' of the earth which he did not perceive, even though he inhabited it, and he saw contained in each of the other man's words the mysteries of a science that would be asexciting to explore as the mines of gold and diamonds he had visited while still almost a child on a journey that he had made to Gujarat and Golconda." ("The Count of Monte-Cristo")
