“Every man's last day is fixed.
Lifetimes are brief and not to be regained,
For all mankind. But by their deeds to make
Their fame last: that is labor for the brave.”

Variant: Look upon him, O my Thebans, on your king, the child of fame!
This mighty man, this Œdipus the lore far-famed could guess,
And envy from each Theban won, so great his lordliness—
Lo to what a surge of sorrow and confusion hath he come!
Let us call no mortal happy till our eyes have seen the doom
And the death-day come upon him—till, unharassed by mischance,
He pass the bound of mortal life, the goal of ordinance.
[ Tr. E. D. A. Morshead http://books.google.com/books?id=i7wXAAAAYAAJ (1885)]
Variant: People of Thebes, my countrymen, look on Oedipus.
He solved the famous riddle, with his brilliance,
he rose to power, a man beyond all power.
Who could behold his greatness without envy?
Now what a black sea of terror has overwhelmed him.
Now as we keep our watch and wait the final day,
count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.
[quoted by Thomas Cahill in Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea]
Source: Oedipus Rex, Line 1529, Choragos.

Source: How They Met, and Other Stories

Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book X, p. 367

The Thirteenth Revelation, Chapter 36

Source: Space Opera (1965), Chapter 4 (p. 30)

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 28
Context: Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you've got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It's an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can't be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either side—that is the terra incognita of the insane. He knew that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That's why he felt that slippage. He knew something was about to happen.