“The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in second-hand worlds. They are aware of much more than they have personally experienced; and their own experience is always indirect.”

Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1962)
Context: Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion. My great predecessor, William Faulkner, speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal fear so long sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human heart in conflict with itself seemed worth writing about.
Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well as of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer's reason for being.
This is not new. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.

The Stolen Child http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1695/, st. 1
Crossways (1889)
Variant: Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
Context: p>Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. </p

The Timeless Path (2009)

From 1980s onwards, Grunch of Giants (1983)

Ring Around the Sun (1954)

Life-study of Numbers - p. 368, of Witness Lee - By Living Stream Ministry, ISBN 978-0-7363-0039-1

Aphorism 45
Novum Organum (1620), Book I
Context: The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, spirals and dragons being (except in name) utterly rejected.

Session 95, Page 63
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 3

Source: Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy