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“Pardon me. I am a simple man, and always prefer to reduce things to elemental simplicity. I raise no opposition, but I express my opinion. Nature is one thing, and art is another.”
“An occasion like this ought to be simple, to guard against the possibility of deception—if
“You are looking for mysteries,” said Krag, “so naturally you are finding them. Try and simplify your ideas, my friend. The affair is plain and serious.”
“They say that speech is given us to deceive others.” “One can deceive with thought, too. But I’m thinking of the best, not the worst.”
they have always mistaken the flow for the ebb.’
wherever you go, help to make the world beautiful, and not ugly.”
“Last night is not today. Do you always walk through the world with your head over your shoulder?”
“Can you grasp that it’s possible to have an aim right in front of one, so big that one can’t see it as a whole?”
I feel that the only thing worth living for is to be so magnanimous that fate itself will be astonished at us. Understand me. It isn’t cynicism, or bitterness, or despair, but heroism....
“I suppose even you clever Matterplay people sometimes misjudge character. However, I don’t mind. Your opinion’s nothing to me, Digrung.
“I’m not asking you to lie, only to keep silent.” “To hide the truth is a special branch of lying.
“Feelings which flourish on illusions, and sicken and die on realities, aren’t worth considering.
“He who is always anxious to teach will learn nothing,”
“Guard you your pride!” returned Spadevil. “Do not make law for the universe and for all time, but for yourself and for this small, false life of yours.”
“Where a bad tree thrives, a good tree will flourish. But where no tree at all can be found, nothing will grow.”
“If you wish to say what is not, many words will not suffice. If you wish to say what is, a few words will be enough.”
His thoughts and images were not freed and loosened, but on the contrary kept labouring and swelling painfully, until they reached the full beauty of an aperçu, which would then flame up in his consciousness, burst, and vanish.
“No—not at all like a dream, and that’s just what I want to explain. This world of yours—and perhaps of mine too, for that matter—doesn’t give me the slightest impression of a dream, or an illusion, or anything of that sort. I know it’s really here at this moment, and it’s exactly as we’re seeing it, you and I. Yet it’s false. It’s false in this sense, Polecrab. Side by side with it another world exists, and that other world is the true one, and this one is all false and deceitful, to the very core. And so it occurs to me that reality and falseness are two words for the same thing.”
“There are three worlds,” said Corpang composedly. “The first is Faceny’s, the second is Amfuse’s, the third is Thire’s. From him Threal gets its name.”
“These three states of perception are the three worlds. Existence is Faceny’s world, relation is Amfuse’s world, feeling is Thire’s world.”
“Nothing can exist here that is not a compound of the three worlds.”
Threal's atmosphere according to Corpang.
“Surtur’s world, or Muspel, we are told, is the original of which this world is a distorted copy. Crystalman is life, but Surtur is other than life.”
“A secret in your ear, Maskull. All laws are female. A true male is an outlaw—outside the law.”
“You are ripe for it. You have run through the gamut. What else is there to live for?”
afterward. It makes all the difference whether one sees darkness through the light, or brightness through the shadows.”
The truth forced itself on him in all its cold, brutal reality. Muspel was no all-powerful Universe, tolerating from pure indifference the existence side by side with it of another false world, which had no right to be. Muspel was fighting for its life—against all that is most shameful and frightful—against sin masquerading as eternal beauty, against baseness masquerading as Nature, against the Devil masquerading as God....
