“It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer.”

“And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.”

“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.”

“There, in his childhood, there was something truly happy that he could have lived with if it returned. But the person living out that happiness no longer existed; it was like remembering someone quite different.”

“You don’t know with what paradise I would have surrounded you. The paradise was in my soul; I would have planted it all round you! Well, you wouldn’t have loved me - so be it, what of it? Everything would have been like that, everything would have stayed like that. You would have talked to me only as a friend - and we would have rejoiced and laughed with joy, as we looked into each other’s eyes. That’s how we would have lived.”

“Our subjective experience of the world tells us the truth about it, even if the language it has to use to do so is cast in forms we have come to see as ‘symptoms’. We live in anxiety, fear and dread because these constitute a proper response to the nature of our social world.”

“A father is very miserable who has no other hold on his children’s affection than the need they have of his assistance, if that can be called affection; he must render himself worthy to be respected by his virtue and wisdom, and beloved by his kindness and the sweetness of his manners;”

If a superior force has taken that part of my soul, why do I, the remaining one, linger behind? What is left is not so dear, nor an entire thing: this day has wrought the destruction of both.

“But man postpones, or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with a reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.”

“Not so long, just once around the sun.”

There, on thoughts that once were mine,
Day looks down the eastern steep,
And the youth at morning shine
Makes the vow he will not keep.

Gwerth cynnydd yw gwarth cenedl,
a’i hedd yw ei hangau hi.

“The universe was exploding, each particle away from the next, hurtling us into dark and lonely space, eternally tearing us away from each other—child out of the womb, friend away from friend, moving from each other, each through his own pathway toward the goal-box of solitary death.

But this was the counterweight, the act of binding and holding. As when men to keep from being swept overboard in the storm clutch at each other’s hands to resist being torn apart, so our bodies fused a link in the human chain that us from being swept into nothing.”

“I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been. And as I start through the opening, I feel the pressure around me, propelling me in violent wavelike motions toward the mouth of the cave.”

“Our experience is unintelligible if we are not taught a language with which to describe it.”

Morning fields of amber grain
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are soothed beneath the artist’s loving hand

“The only thing constant about us at all is the doing rather than the being. It’s the way we behave, the way we dance. Only there’s no “we” that dances, there’s just the dancing.”

“And can you, then, who have got such possessions and so many of them, covet our poor tents?

Are you not ashamed to reserve for yourself only the remnant of life, and to set apart for wisdom only that time which cannot be devoted to any business? How late it is to begin to live just when we must cease to live!

A younger you and a younger me
Meeting at the serpentine
I am yours, you are mine

I still pretend you’re only out of sight
In another room, smiling at your phone

Your shyness stoked my boldness
“Shall we go in?” I smiled
Your hand warmed walking through the gallery

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there

“Of cheap things it is the cheapest. Everywhere it goes begging. Nature spills it out with a lavish hand. Where there is room for one life, she sows a thousand lives, and it’s life eats life till the strongest and most piggish life is left.”

“Be courageous, ma chérie. It is no doubt the last time that I write you. Today, I will have lived.”

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”

“And when it is accomplished — behold! — all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile — and the return to an eternal rest.”

“One has to say things. The moment passes, and then you’re alone again.”

“Eventually all things merge into one, and a river flows through it.”

signed char lotte

Wylit, wylit, Lywelyn
Wylit waed pe gwelit hyn.
Ein calon gan estron ŵr,
Ein coron gan goncwerwr,
A gwerin o ffafrgarwyr
Llariaidd eu gwên lle’r oedd gwŷr.

“An economy primarily driven by growth must generate discontent.”

“We both step and do not step into the same, we both are and are not”

“We should often blush at our noblest deeds if the world were to see all their underlying motives.”

“Our fear of death seems to me to be an error of evolution.”

And now and then
If we must start again
Well, we will know for sure
That I will love you

“We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.”