If there be devils, would I were a devil, To live and burn in everlasting fire, So I might have your company in hell, But to torment you with my bitter tongue!
So do the dark in soul expire, Or live like scorpion girt by fire; So writhes the mind remorse hath riven, Unfit for earth, undoom'd for heaven, Darkness above, despair beneath, Around it flame, within it death.
The spread of civilisation may be likened to a fire; first, a feeble spark, next a flickering flame, then a mighty blaze, ever increasing in speed and power.
All through it, I have known myself to be quite undeserving. And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire- a fire, however, inseparable in its nature from myself, quickening nothing, lighting nothing, doing no service, idly burning away.
What sex is, we don't know, but it must be some sort of fire. For it always communicates a sense of warmth, of glow. And when this glow becomes a pure shine, then we feel the sense of beauty. We all have the fire of sex slumbering or burning inside us. If we live to be ninety, it is still there. Or, if it dies, we become one of those ghastly living corpses which are unfortunately becoming more numerous in the world.
Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species - back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire - has been ethically ambiguous.