“Hard to the heart is final death: fain would an Ens not end in Nil;
Love made the senti'ment kindly good: the Priest perverted all to ill.”
The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)
Context: Hard to the heart is final death: fain would an Ens not end in Nil;
Love made the senti'ment kindly good: the Priest perverted all to ill.
While Reason sternly bids us die, Love longs for life beyond the grave:
Our hearts, affections, hopes and fears for Life-to-be shall ever crave.
Hence came the despot's darling dream, a Church to rule and sway the State;
Hence sprang the train of countless griefs in priestly sway and rule innate.
For future Life who dares reply? No witness at the bar have we;
Save what the brother Potsherd tells, — old tales and novel jugglery.
Who e'er return'd to teach the Truth, the things of Heaven and Hell to limn?
And all we hear is only fit for grandam-talk and nursery-hymn.
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Richard Francis Burton 78
British explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, … 1821–1890Related quotes

Part VIII
The City of Dreadful Night (1870–74)

“For all the ill that is in us comes from fear, and all the good from love.”
Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard (1922)
Context: Women are so strangely constructed that they have in them darkness as well as light, though it be but a little curtain hung across the sun. And love is the hand that takes the curtain down, a stronger hand than fear, which hung it up. For all the ill that is in us comes from fear, and all the good from love.

“It’s an ill wind as blows nobody no good, as I always say. And All’s well as ends Better!”

“It was men’s ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.”
“The Finder” (p. 56)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)

"Soul Blindness", as quoted Our Woman Workers: Biographical Sketches of Women Eminent in the Universalist Church for Literary, Philanthropic and Christian Work (1881) by E. R. Hanson.
Context: How near another's heart we oft may stand,
Yet all unknowing what we fain would know
Its heights of joy, its depths of bitter woe,
As, wrecked upon some desert island's strand,
They watch our white sails near and nearer grow;
Then we, who for their rescue death would dare,
Unheeding pass, and leave them to despair.

Source: A Companion to Jan Hus (2015), p. 225.