“Bubble, bubble, flows the stream
Like an old tune through a dream.”
In Haunts of Bass and Bream.
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Maurice Thompson 3
American novelist 1844–1901Related quotes
“Man’s life is but a jest,
A dream, a shadow, bubble, air, a vapor at the best.”
The Jester’s Sermon. Compare: "Life is a jest and all things show it; I thought so once, but now I know it", John Gay, My own Epitaph; "Life is an empty dream", Robert Browning, Paracelsus, ii.; "Life ’s but a series of trifles at best", Anonymous.
“Love is a golden bubble, full of dreams,
That waking breaks, and fills us with extremes.”
Hero and Leander: a poem (1600), begun by Christopher Marlowe, and finished by George Chapman. Sestiad III.
"Rainbow Stew", on Rainbow Stew Live at Anaheim Stadium (July 1981) · Performance on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEDT7QGDzsE
Variant: One of these days when the air clears up
And the sun come shining through
We'll all be drinking free bubble up
And eating some rainbow stew.
Lecture XX, "Conclusions"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Context: Science... has ended by utterly repudiating the personal point of view. She catalogues her elements and records her laws indifferent as to what purpose may be shown forth by them, and constructs her theories quite careless of their bearing on human anxieties and fates. Though the scientist may individually nourish a religion, and be a theist in his irresponsible hours, the days are over when it could be said that for Science herself the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Our solar system, with its harmonies, is seen now as but one passing case of a certain sort of moving equilibrium in the heavens, realized by a local accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life can exist. In a span of time which as a cosmic interval will count but as an hour, it will have ceased to be. The Darwinian notion of chance production, and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest as well as to the smallest facts. It is impossible, in the present temper of the scientific imagination, to find in the driftings of the cosmic atoms, whether they work on the universal or on the particular scale, anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing, achieving no proper history, and leaving no result. Nature has no one distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel a sympathy. In the vast rhythm of her processes... she appears to cancel herself. The books of natural theology which satisfied the intellects of our grandfathers seem to us quite grotesque, representing, as they did, a God who conformed the largest things of nature to the paltriest of our private wants. The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals. The bubbles on the foam which coats a stormy sea are floating episodes, made and unmade by the forces of the wind and water. Our private selves are like those bubbles—epiphenomena, as Clifford, I believe, ingeniously called them; their destinies weigh nothing and determine nothing in the world's irremediable currents of events.
Source: Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (1960), p. 22
Context: Water and a bubble on it are one and the same. The bubble has its birth in the water, floats on it, and is ultimately resolved into it. So also the Jivatman (individual soul) and the Paramatman (supreme soul) are one and the same, the difference between them being only one of degree. For, one is finite and limited while the other is infinite; one is dependent while the other is independent.
