“Most of us, even if only for two minutes in our lives, have experienced at some time or another an inexplicable and random sense of complete bliss, unrelated to anything that was happening in the outside world.”

Confessions Of A Sceptic
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: Life complete, is lived in two worlds; the one inside, and the one outside. The first half of our days is spent wholly in the former; the second, if it is what it ought to be, wholly in the latter — till our education is almost finished; theories are only words to us, and church controversy is not of things but of shadows of things. Through all that time life and thought beyond our own experience is but a great game played out by book actors; we do not think, we only think we think, and we have been too busy in our own line to have a notion really of what is beyond it. But while so much of our talk is so unreal, our own selves, our own risings, fallings, aspirings, resolutions, misgivings, these are real enough to us; these are our hidden life, our sanctuary of our own mysteries.

Part Two, Ch. 4
On the Road (1957)

Source: Going Bovine

Source: White Noise

All shall be well (2014)

Miami Beach, Florida, January 16, 1981
1980s

Epitaph on William Muir
Posthumous Pieces (1799)

The Book Fool, p. 296.
A History of Reading (1996)