Lost Horizon

by James Hilton

"They devote themselves, madam, to contemplation and to the pursuit of wisdom." "But that isn't DOING anything." "Then, madam, they do nothing."

We have a dream and a vision. It is a vision that first appeared to old Perrault when he lay dying in this room in the year 1789. He looked back then on his long life, as I have already told you, and it seemed to him that all the loveliest things were transient and perishable, and that war, lust, and brutality might someday crush them until there were no more left in the world. He remembered sights he had seen with his own eyes, and with his mind he pictured others; he saw the nations strengthening, not in wisdom, but in vulgar passions and the will to destroy; he saw their machine power multiplying until a single-weaponed man might have matched a whole army of the Grand Monarque. And he perceived that when they had filled the land and sea with ruin, they would take to the air... Can you say that his vision was untrue?"

"Perhaps the exhaustion of the passions is the beginning of wisdom, if you care to alter the proverb."