Will > Will's Quotes

“O gods, rob not the earth of the dim hush that hangs round all Your temples, bereave not all the world of old romance, take not the glamour from the moonlight nor tear the wonder out of the white mists in every land; for, O ye gods of the childhood of the world, when You have left the earth You shall have taken the mystery from the sea and all its glory from antiquity, and You shall have wrenched our hope from the dim future. There shall be no strange cities at night time half understood, nor songs in the twilight, and the whole of the wonder shall have died with last year's flowers in little gardens or hill-slopes leaning south; for with the gods must go the enchantment of the plains and all the magic of dark woods, and something shall be lacking from the quiet of early dawn.”
― Lord Dunsany

“Yet in the blood of man there is a tide, an old sea-current rather, that is somehow akin to the twilight, which brings him rumours of beauty from however far away, as driftwood is found at sea from islands not yet discovered: and this spring-tide or current that visits the blood of man comes from the fabulous quarter of his lineage, from the legendary, the old; it takes him out to the woodlands, out to the hills; he listens to ancient song.”
― Lord Dunsany, The Book of Wonder

“Alas! You have shattered the beautiful world with a brazen fist; It falls, it is scattered - By a demigod destroyed. We are trailing the ruins into the void and wailing over a beauty undone and ended. Earth's mighty son, more splendid rebuild it, you that are strong, build it again within! And begin a new life, a new way, lucid and gay, and play new songs.”
― Goethe , Faust

“Surely... the great mountains of the world are a present remedy if men did but know it against our modern discontent and ambitions. In the hills is wisdom's fount. They are deep in time. They know the ways of the sun and the wind, the lightning's fiery feet, the frost that shattereth, the rain that shroudeth, the snow that putteth about their nakedness a softer coverlet than fine lawn: which if their large philosophy question not if it be a bridal sheet or a shroud, hath not this unpolicied calm his justification ever in the returning year, and is it not an instance to laugh our carefulness out of fashion? Of us, little children of the dust, children of a day, who with so many burdens do burden us with taking thought and with fears and desires and devious schemings of the mind, so that we wax old before our time and fall weary ere the brief day be spent and one reaping-hook gather us home at last for all our pains.”
― E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros

“You can lower yourselves to the level of the beast, but you can also be reborn as a divine creature by the free will of your spirit. Man can become what he likes - subhuman or superhuman, as he wishes.”
― Pico Della Mirandola

“Keda's oldness was the work of fate, alchemy. An occult agedness. A transparent darkness. A broken and mysterious grove. A tragedy, a glory, a decay. - Titus Groan”
― Mervyn Peake

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Among the so-called neurotics of our day there are a good many who in other ages would not have been neurotic - that is, divided against themselves. If they had lived in a period and in a milieu in which man was still linked by myth with the world of the ancestors, and thus with nature truly experienced and not merely seen from the outside, they would have been spared this division with themselves.”
― Carl Jung

“The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.”
― Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“The men with whom we live resemble a field of ruins of the most precious sculptural designs where everything shouts at us: come, help, perfect ... we yearn immeasurably to become whole.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“It is one mark of rational beings that they do not live only - or even at all - in the present. They have the freedom to despise the world that surrounds them and to live in another way.”
― Roger Scruton, Beauty

“Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. ”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are born.
Every Morn and every Night
Some are born to Sweet Delight,
Some are born to Endless Night.”
― William Blake