“Your joy is only moment’s exhalation,
at most a blink of eye is your dejection.
As sweetly falls your silent sleep’s protection
you sink in soft earth’s breast, like wheat’s oblation.

Thus Beauty, whose completed germination
was hindered by unfinished life’s perfection,
will in your dying see a resurrection –
a thousand-fold its great reanimation.

For when you’re in your grave you’re handed over
to probing roots of lilac and of lime tree,
to buds the sap is drawn above the clover

aflame to burst in summer’s honeyed finery
of blossomed trees, and so your radiant dreaming
will sweet fulfilment find in springtime’s teeming.”

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), I Philosophy

In Your Eyes
Song lyrics, So (1986)

Source: Handle with Care

I:13.
The Book of the Law (1904)

“Good men are dying every moment,” Gretchen replied coldly, “somewhere. Since they did not ask my leave to do so, I feel no particular obligation toward them.”
Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 13, “Tabloids” (p. 219)

Der Menscheit Würde ist in Eure Hand gegeben, bewahret Sie!
Sie sinkt mit euch! Mit euch wird sie sich heben!
Die Künstler (The Artists)
Variant translation: The dignity of mankind is in your hands, preserve it!

2010s, 2016, August, Speech at rally in Wilmington, North Carolina (August 9, 2016)