“What if this present were the world's last night?”
John Donne book Holy Sonnets
No. 13, line 1
Holy Sonnets (1633)
“Frantic administration of panaceas to the world is certainly discouraged by the reflection that "this present" might be "the world's last night"; sober work for the future, within the limits of ordinary morality and prudence, is not.”
The World's Last Night (1952)
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Clive Staples Lewis272
Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist 1898–1963Related quotes
Robert Fripp (1946) English guitarist, composer and record producer
Quoted in Robert Fripp's Online Diary, Thursday, 4 June 2009 <br class="br">The Six Principles of the Performance Event <br class="br">Source: http://www.dgmlive.com/diaries.htm?artist=&show=&member=3&entry=14777
“Men might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.”
Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman
1850s, West India Emancipation (1857)
Context: Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. [... ] Men might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.
George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher
Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Appendix B: The System in its Ethical Necessity and its Practical Bearings, p.402
Bruce Cockburn (1945) Canadian folk/rock guitarist and singer-songwriter
Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu (1999)
John P. Kotter (1947) author of The heart of Change
Introduction to the 2002 edition, p. 12
The Heart of Change, (2002)
Michel De Montaigne book Essays
Book II, Ch. 12. Apology for Raimond Sebond
Essais (1595), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883) British economic historian
Source: Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884), p. 31
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist
The Inferno (1917), Ch. XIV
Context: Where are the words that will light the way? What is humanity in the world, and what is the world?
Everything is within me, and there are no judges, and there are no boundaries and no limits to me. The de profundis, the effort not to die, the fall of desire with its soaring cry, all this has not stopped. It is part of the immense liberty which the incessant mechanism of the human heart exercises (always something different, always!).