In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final. In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.
The reason that adulation is not displeasing is that, though untrue, it shows one to be of consequence enough, in one way or other, to induce people to lie.
But remember please, the Law by which we live, we are not built to comprehend a lie, we can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die.
The comprehensibility of the world seems to me a wonder or eternal secret. Here lies the sense of wonder which increases even more with the development of our knowledge.
The essence of any religion lies solely in the answer to the question: why do I exist, and what is my relationship to the infinite universe that surrounds me?
Just as the value of a house lies in its location, The value of a mind lies in its depth, The value of giving lies in the presence of a generous spirit, The value of words lies in their reliability.
Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of being.
Again, truth should be highly valued; if, as we were saying, a lie is useless to the gods, and useful only as a medicine to men, then the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians; private individuals have no business with them.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies, The tufted crow-toe, and pale gessamine, The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet, The glowing violet, The musk-rose, and the well attir'd woodbine, With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, And every flower that sad embroidery wears: Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, And daffadillies fill their cups with tears, To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.