“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”

— Henry David Thoreau , book Walden ou la vie dans les bois

Source: Walden

Last update March 7, 2023. History

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Henry David Thoreau 385

1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitio… 1817–1862

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“Beneath our feet and o'er our head
Is equal warning given:
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Above us is the heaven! Death rides on every passing breeze,
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Its peril every hour.”

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“All this is within us, and has fallen upon our heads. And God Himself, who is all these kinds of heavens in one, has fallen on our heads like thunder, and His infinity is ours.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI
Context: The heavens have fallen on our heads! What a tremendous idea! It is the loftiest cry that life hurls. That was the cry of deliverance for which I had been groping until then. I had had a foreboding it would come, because a thing of glory like a poet's song always gives something to us poor living shadows, and human thought always reveals the world. But I needed to have it said explicitly so as to bring human misery and human grandeur together. I needed it as a key to the vault of the heavens.
These heavens, that is to say, the azure that our eyes enshrine, purity, plenitude — and the infinite number of suppliants, the sky of truth and religion. All this is within us, and has fallen upon our heads. And God Himself, who is all these kinds of heavens in one, has fallen on our heads like thunder, and His infinity is ours.