Earth Abides

by George R. Stewart

They would pay the penalty which in the history of the world, he knew, had always been inflicted upon organisms which specialized too highly.

Destroy the culture-pattern in which people lived, and often the shock was too great for the individuals. Take away family and job, friends and church, all customary amusements and routines, hope too—and life became walking death.

When the opportunity was at your hand, you did not dare to seize it. When the opportunity was lost, it became precious.

The match lived, not when it lay in the box, but merely when it burned—and it could not burn forever. So too with men and women. Not by denying life was life lived.

“It’s better,” he thought in words, remembering some bit of reading, “to have no opinion of God at all than to have one that is unworthy of Him.”

“Genius is the capacity for seeing what is not there.” Of course, like every other definition of genius, that one could be shot to pieces also, because it obviously included the madman, as well as the genius.

Perhaps rationalism—like so much else—had only been one of the luxuries which men could afford under civilization.

For he realized that a man should make peace with himself, even though all conditions changed, and that a man should face the question of whether in his life he had satisfied the ideas which he had built up within himself as to what he should be, and that all this was not a matter of priests and religion but of a man himself.

Men go and come, but earth abides.”