Source: Samson Agonistes (1671), Lines 1687-1692 & 1697-1707
Context: But he, though blind of sight,
Despised, and thought extinguished quite,
With inward eyes illuminated,
His fiery virtue roused
From under ashes into sudden flame,
[... ]
So Virtue, given for lost,
Depressed and overthrown, as seemed,
Like that self-begotten bird
In the Arabian woods embost,
That no second knows nor third,
And lay erewhile a holocaust,
From out her ashy womb now teemed,
Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
When most unactive deemed;
And, though her body die, her fame survives,
A secular bird, ages of lives.
“However Simon thought of the beast, there rose before his inward sight the picture of a human at once heroic and sick.”
Source: Lord of the Flies (1954), Ch. 6: Beast from Air.
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William Golding 79
British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Lite… 1911–1993Related quotes
“He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place.”
Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
“You follow the same paths of thought as before. Only, they appear strewn with roses.”
Man geht immer die gleichen Wege des Denkens wie vorher. Nur scheinen sie mit Rosen bestreut.
"Main features of my first impression of hashish" (18 December 1927), On Hashish (2006), p. 22
Main features of my first impression of hashish (1927)
Part II. Of the Extent of Sensible Knowledge.
The Physiology of the Senses: Or, How and what We See, Hear, Taste, Feel and Smell (1856)
“It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.”
"Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: p> If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the room and on the stair,Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghostOr Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolnessA vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.</p
“The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!”
Letter https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-2743.xml to Asa Gray, 3 April 1860
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