“But the words are easy and soothing, promising tomorrow will be more hopeful than this awful piece o time we call today.”

Source: The Lost Thing

Connections (1979), 1 - The Trigger Effect
Context: The Egyptians built an empire and ran it with a handful of technology... the wheel, irrigation canals, the loom, the calendar, pen & ink, some cutting tools, some simple metallurgy, and the plough, the invention that triggered it all off. And yet look how complex and sophisticated their civilisation was. And how soon it happened, after that first man-made harvest. The Egyptian plough and those of the few other civilisations sprang up around the world at the same time... Gave us control over nature... And at the same time, tied us for good, to the things that we invent so that tomorrow will be better than today. The Egyptians knew that. That's why they had gods. To make sure that their systems didn't fail.

Original: (it) La musica è senza tempo. Un bel brano di ieri, è bello oggi e sarà bello domani.
Source: prevale.net

Foreword
Historia Calamitatum (c. 1132)
Context: Often the hearts of men and women are stirred, as likewise they are soothed in their sorrows, more by example than by words. And therefore, because I too have known some consolation from speech had with one who was a witness thereof, am I now minded to write of the sufferings which have sprung out of my misfortunes, for the eyes of one who, though absent, is of himself ever a consoler. This I do so that, in comparing your sorrows with mine, you may discover that yours are in truth nought, or at the most but of small account, and so shall you come to bear them more easily.

Canto I, stanza 15.
The Corsair (1814)