“He looked at the walls,
Awed at the heights
His people had achieved
And for a moment -- just a moment --
All that lay behind him
Passed from view.”

—  Herbert Mason

Source: The Epic of Gilgamesh

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "He looked at the walls, Awed at the heights His people had achieved And for a moment -- just a moment -- All that lay b…" by Herbert Mason?
Herbert Mason photo
Herbert Mason 1
British film director and producer 1891–1960

Related quotes

Juliet Marillier photo

“All that he had of her was his memory, where he held every moment, every single moment that she had been his. That was all he had, to keep out the loneliness.”

Juliet Marillier book Daughter of the Forest

Source: Daughter of the Forest

“He put an arm around his brother to help him up. And then, for a moment, he just held on.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: The Fury / Dark Reunion

Margaret Mitchell photo

“His voice stopped and they looked for a long quiet moment into each other's eyes and between them lay the sunny lost youth that they had so unthinkingly shared.”

Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949) American author and journalist
Colin Wilson photo

“The real problem of living creatures is that for most of the time they are not aware that they are an active force. They become aware of it briefly -- as the lion tracks its prey, as the warrior gallops into battle -- but, for the most part, they feel as helpless as leaves carried on the wind. When we look back at our struggles, we often become aware of how much we have achieved. Meanwhile, as we plod along in the present moment, trying to anticipate the next problem, life seems a long uphill grind. Yet man has always had these moments in which he sees that things are not as bad as they appear -- those moments of exaltation or deep relaxation, when he suddenly becomes aware of the powers of his own mind. It is in these moments that he suddenly grasps the basic nature of his problem: that he is stifled and blinded by "close-upness" -- by the sheer pressure of the world against his senses. The moments of insight permit him a bird's-eye view of his own life, and make him aware that his everyday consciousness amounts to a worm's-eye view.”

Colin Wilson book The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders

Source: The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988), p. 248

Gabrielle Roy photo

“He realized that Florentine personified this kind of wretched life against which his whole being was in revolt. And in the same moment he understood the feeling that drew him toward her: she was his own poverty, his solitude, his sad childhood, his lonely youth. She was all that he had hated, all that he had left behind him, but also everything that remained intimately linked to him, the most profound part of his nature and the powerful spur of his destiny.”

Gabrielle Roy book The Tin Flute

P 205
The Tin Flute (1945)

P.G. Wodehouse photo

“[of Spode] He was, as I had already been able to perceive, a breath-taking cove. About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla and had changed its mind at the last moment.”

P.G. Wodehouse book The Code of the Woosters

The Code of the Woosters (1938)

Richard Feynman photo

“It's a feeling of awe — of scientific awe — which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had this emotion. It could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

Part 5: "The World of One Physicist", "But Is It Art?", p. 261
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)
Context: I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It's difficult to describe because it's an emotion. It's analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the whole universe: there's a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run "behind the scenes" by the same organization, the same physical laws. It's an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It's a feeling of awe — of scientific awe — which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had this emotion. It could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.

Thomas Wolfe photo

“And it was this that awed him — the weird combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time.”

Thomas Wolfe book Look Homeward, Angel

Source: Look Homeward, Angel (1929), p. 157

John F. Kennedy photo

“But Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment: "Stay, thou art so fair." And our liberty, too, is endangered if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress. For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Address in the Assembly Hall at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt
Variant: Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.
Documents on International Affairs, 1963, Royal Institute of International Affairs, ed. Sir John Wheeler Wheeler-Bennett, p. 36.

George Eliot photo

“But a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he had not demonstrably merited—a perpetual suspicious conjecture that the views entertained of him were not to his advantage— a melancholy absence of passion in his efforts at achievement, and a passionate resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

Related topics