Quotes about dust
page 4

“I begin my work under the effect of shock, which I can sense and which gets me on the run from reality... In any case, I need a starting point, even if it’s just a speck of dust or a gleam of light.”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

1940 - 1960
Source: On the Readability of Signs; Miro's path from Mysterious to Comic Pictorial signs, Sylvia Martin; Düsseldorf 2002, p. 67

Reality, Sense, Light

“Without fear or favour whatever successes I have been able to make of my life, I owe to the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi who could make man out of dust. I was greatly inspired in my youth by a remark Jawaharlal Nehru had made, ‘Success comes to those that dare and act…’ In fact this remark was my motto in life.”

Neelam Sanjiva Reddy (1913–1996) sixth President of India

in 1989 - towards the end of his Presidential term Source: Pranab Mukherjee Press Information Bureau in: Speech by the President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherjee at the concluding function of the centenary celebrations of the former President of India, Dr. Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=102099, Press Information Bureau, Government of India President's Secretariat

Life, Youth, Fear, Success

“The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings:
Sceptre and Crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.”

James Shirley The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses

sc. iii.
The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses

Death, Fate

“My father … rarely smiled. Then I did not know why, but now I do know that it was overwork, under-nourishment and the burdens of daily living which had made a broken man out of him, although still so young in years. His eyes were perpetually inflamed by the coal dust which also gnawed away at his lungs and made him spit out black sputum.”

Angelo Herndon (1913–1997) African American communist

Source: Let Me Live (1937), p. 7

Smile

“First our pleasures die — and then
Our hopes, and then our fears — and when
These are dead, the debt is due,
Dust claims dust — and we die too.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Death (Shelley, 2)

Death (1820), st. 3

Pleasure, Fear, Hope, Dead

“Abraham teaches us the right way of conversing with God: "And Abraham fell on his face, and God talked with him." When we plead with Him, our faces should be in the dust.”

Richard Cecil (clergyman) (1748–1810) British Evangelical Anglican priest and social reformer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 332.

God, Way

“No one is beat till he quits,
No one is through till he stops,
No matter how hard Failure hits,
No matter how often he drops,
A fellow's not down till he lies
In the dust and refuses to rise.”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

Defeat, stanza 1, p. 112.
A Heap o' Livin' (1916)

Failure

“What joy have I in June's return?
My feet are parched—my eyeballs burn,
I scent no flowery gust;
But faint the flagging Zephyr springs,
With dry Macadam on its wings,
And turns me "dust to dust."”

Thomas Hood (1799–1845) British writer

Ode Imitated from Horace (1844), st. 2.
1840s

Spring, Joy

“Go where the others have gone, to the tenebrous limit
for the golden fleece of void, your ultimate prize
go upright among those who are on their knees
among those turning their backs on and those fallen to dust.”

Zbigniew Herbert (1924–1998) Polish writer

Message of Mr. Cogito.
Quoes

“I know you are asking today, "How long will it take?" Somebody's asking, "How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their understanding, and drive bright-eyed wisdom from her sacred throne?" Somebody's asking, "When will wounded justice, lying prostrate on the streets of Selma and Birmingham and communities all over the South, be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men?" Somebody's asking, "When will the radiant star of hope be plunged against the nocturnal bosom of this lonely night, plucked from weary souls with chains of fear and the manacles of death? How long will justice be crucified, and truth bear it?" I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because "truth crushed to earth will rise again." How long? Not long, because "no lie can live forever."”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

How long? Not long, because "you shall reap what you sow."
1960s, How Long, Not Long (1965)

Death, Wisdom, Men, Children

“Bolitho heard the blare of a trumpet and saw the sun gleam across black-plumed helmets and breast-plates as the horses changed formation and cantered into another wall of dust.”

Douglas Reeman (1924–2017) British author

A Tradition of Victory, Cap 7 "The Ceres"

Change, Sun, Horse

“Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Kafka on the Shore (2002)

Feeling, Imagination, Flowers, Understanding

“There it is — in such patient silence — that we accumulate the inward power which we distribute and spend in action; that the soul acquires a greater and more vigorous being, and gathers up its collective forces to bear down upon the piecemeal difficulties of life and scatter them to dust; there alone can we enter into that spirit of self-abandonment by which we take up the cross of duty, however heavy, with feet however worn and bleeding.”

Wayland Hoyt (1838–1910) American Baptist Minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 470.

Life, Soul, Silence

“What are the ingredients of the most creatively meaningful image of human existence that the mind can conceive? Remove human frailty--as grass, as a sigh, as dust, as moth-crushed--and the estimate becomes romantic. Remove grandeur--a little lower than God--and aspiration recedes. Remove sin-the tendency to miss the mark--and sentimentality threatens. Remove freedom--choose ye this day!--and responsibility goes by the board. Remove, finally, divine parentage and life becomes estranged, cut loose and adrift on a cold, indifferent sea. With all that has been discovered about human life in the intervening 2,500 years, it is difficult to find a flaw in this assessment.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

On the Torah's take on human existence.
The World's Religions (1991)

Life, God, Freedom, Grass

“There are many who write good deeds in the dust, and injuries on marble.”

Stefano Guazzo (1530–1593) Italian writer

Ve ne sono molti che scrivono i beneficii nella polvere, e l'ingiurie nel marmo.
Del Prencipe di Valacchia, p. 79.
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 436.

“The somewhere we're goin' to, and got to go to if we don't want to get wiped out, it's somewhere everlastingly and eternally ahead! It's like to-morrow; when we get there we aren't there; we got to keep goin', and we got to everlastingly and eternally keep goin' – and goin' fast! If we don't, the Almighty hasn't got a bit o' use for us; He turns us right into dust and scattered old bones, and nothin's left of our whole country and our finest cities except some street paving and a few cellars with weeds in 'em.”

Booth Tarkington (1869–1946) American novelist

The Plutocrat (1927), chapter 30 (Earl Tinker speaking to Jean-Edouard Le Seyeux)

Country

“He who has envisioned evolution will approach it carefully, joyously brushing away the dust on the path. Most important, there will be no fear in him. And rejecting the unnecessary he will acquire simplicity. It is easy to understand that the realization of evolution is always beautiful.
Again they will ask: "Why at the beginning of the path is so much that is pleasant accorded and so much forgiven?" It is because in the beginning all fires are full blown and the called one walks as a torch. It is up to him to choose the quality of his fire. He who comprehends the discipline of spirit will understand the direction of the fire and will approach the cooperation for the General Good. The end of the path can be illumined by athousand fires of the General Good. These thousand fires will light the rainbow of the aura. Therefore, the discipline of spirit is wings!”

Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947) Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, enlightener, philosopher

Introduction
Leaves Of Morya's Garden (1924 - 1925), Book II : Illumination (1925)

Fear, Beauty, Understanding, Light

“I remember being awakened one morning by voices in the room where I slept. There was a whizzing sound which made itself heard between the voices now and then. It was the sound of spinning-wheels, and the voices were those of women spinning and carding wool. The dust of the room danced in a ray of sunshine which shone through the high narrow window that lighted the room..”

Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) French painter

Quote, c. 1870; as cited by Julia Cartwright in Jean Francois Millet, his Life and Letters, Swan Sonnenschein en Co, Lim. London / The Macmillian Company, New York; second edition, September 1902, p. 12
taken from Millet's youth-memories, he wrote down on request of his friend and later biographer Alfred Sensier, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Sensier]
1870 - 1875

Women, Light, Dance

“If I fall along the way, pick me up and dust me off; If I get too tired to make it, be my breath so I can walk; If I need some other love then, give me more than I can stand; When my smile gets old and faded, just wait around I'll smile again; It shouldn't be so complicated, just hold me and then, just hold me again”

Rob Thomas (1972) American singer

Love, Smile, Way, Waiting

“My arrangement of my shelves may earn me a reputation for untidiness among the unthinking, but I am indifferent to these. From natural laziness – if you like – from sheer inability to discover any congruity between one book and another – I will not classify. There they are – as they come – as they go – in serried shelves – all happy with the fortuity of things – there are my books from the lowest shelf – to reach which the seeker must go (as he ought) on bended knees – to "the dust and silence of the upper shelf," as Lord Macaulay put it – there they are – awaiting the touch of the discerning hand and the light of the critical eye.
The Bankrupt Bookseller by Will Y. Darling, Robert Grant & Son Ltd, Edinburgh, 1947, p. 28.”

William Darling (politician) (1885–1962) Scottish politician

The Bankrupt Bookseller (1947)

Books, Nature, Light, Silence

“They passed a farmhouse, a simple shack surrounded by animals — a lazy burro, clucking chickens, a litter of pigs. The farmhouse stood alone in the desolate landscape. There was no sign of a living person anywhere. And then it was gone, lost in the swirling dust plume of the car.”

Michael Crichton book Zero Cool

Zero Cool, written under the pseudonym John Lange (1969)

Cars, Animals, Personality

“He [Tolstoy] could see little good in the clergy, while he utterly condemned the military, the rulers of the earth, the judges, the capitalists, the landlords, the merchants, the jailers, the functionaries. He assailed modern art and classed artists with scientists and ministers as the lackeys of a degenerate and parasitic class of wealthy men. Political economists he considered as retainers of the same class and their product as the throwing of dust in the eyes of those who seek for a way out of our unhappy social conditions.”

Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect

Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 77

Men, Art, Way

“a speck of dust hanging/in a vertical wall of light.’ ( Letter from the Hills )”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

St Cyril Road and Other Poems (2005)

Light

“Well it's bulls and blood,
It's dust and mud,
It's the roar of a Sunday crowd.
It's the white in his knuckles,
The gold in the buckle,
He'll win the next go 'round.
It's boots and chaps,
It's cowboy hats,
It's spurs and latigo.
It's the ropes and the reins,
And the joy and the pain,
And they call the thing rodeo.”

Garth Brooks (1962) American country music artist

Rodeo, written by Larry Bastian.
Song lyrics, Ropin' the Wind (1991)

Pain, Joy

“Neither dust nor light stirred. It was as if time had been bled dry and given up.”

China Miéville book The Scar

Part 3 “The Compass Factory”, chapter 20 (p. 241)
The Scar (2002)

Light, Time

“That the nation has found a consensus for its highest office in some one who has sprung from the grass-roots of our society and grown up in the dust and heat of this sacred land is symbolic of the fact that the concerns of the common man have now moved to the centre stage of our social and political life. It is this larger significance of my election rather than any personal sense of honour that makes me rejoice on this occasion.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Source: Speech By Shri Kocheril Raman Narayanan On His Assumption Of Office As President Of India https://web.archive.org/web/19970804210818/alfa.nic.in/rb/krn_asum.htm, National Informatics Center, 25 July, 1997

Life, Sense, Grass, Personality

“The little toy dog is covered with dust,
But sturdy and stanch he stands;
And the little toy soldier is red with rust,
And his musket moulds in his hands.
Time was when the little toy dog was new,
And the soldier was passing fair;
And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue
Kissed them and put them there.”

Eugene Field (1850–1895) American writer

Little Boy Blue http://www.amherst.edu/~rjyanco94/literature/eugenefield/poems/poemsofchildhood/littleboyblue.html, st. 1 Love Songs of Childhood (1894)

Dogs, Boy, Kiss, Time

“The priest looked at him. Do I know you? he said.
Suttree placed one hand on the pew in front of him. An old woman was going along the altar rail with a dusting rag. He struggled to his feet. No, he said. You dont know me.
The priest stepped back, inspecting is clothes, his fishstained shoes.
I just fell asleep a minute. I was resting.
The priest gave a little smile, lightly touched with censure, remonstrance gentled. God's house is not exactly the place to take a nap, he said.
It's not God's house.
I beg your pardon?
It's not God's house.
Oh?
Suttree waved his hand vaguely and stepped past the priest and went down the aisle. The priest watched him. He smiled sadly, but a smile for that.”

Cormac McCarthy book Suttree

page 255
Suttree (1979)

God, Smile, Shoe, Past

“Yet leaving here a name, I trust,
That will not perish in the dust.”

Robert Southey (1774–1843) British poet

My Days Among the Dead Are Past, st. 4.

“But we, who name ourselves its sovereigns, we,
Half dust, half deity, alike unfit
To sink or soar.”

George Gordon Byron book Manfred

Act I, scene ii.
Manfred (1817)

“For every thing exists & not one sigh nor smile nor tear,
One hair nor particle of dust, not one can pass away.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Source: 1800s, Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion (c. 1803–1820), Ch. 1, plate 13, line 66 — plate 14, line 1

Smile, Tear

“There are clouds, wind, smoke and dust and noise, over head and around, and there always will be; but no genuine thunder, with destructive bolt, menaces from any quarter of the sky. The real trouble with us was never our system or form of government, or the principles underlying it, but the peculiar composition of our people; the relations existing between them and the compromising spirit which controlled the ruling power of the country.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

People, Country

“One who is not perturbed by misfortune, who is beyond comfort, attachment and fear, who considers gold as dust. He neither speaks ill of others nor feels elated by praise and shuns greed, attachments and arrogance. He is indifferent to ecstasy and tragedy, is not affected by honors or humiliations. He renounces expectations, greed. He is neither attached to the worldliness, nor lets senses and anger affect him. In such a person resides God.”

Guru Tegh Bahadur (1621–1675) The ninth Guru of Sikhism

Guru Tegh Bahadur, Sorath 633 (Translated by Gopal Singh), Tegh Bahadur (Translated by Gopal Singh) (2005). Mahalla nawan: compositions of Guru Tegh Bahādur-the ninth guru (from Sri Guru Granth Sahib): Bāṇī Gurū Tega Bahādara. Allied Publishers. pp. xxviii–xxxiii, 15–27. ISBN 978-81-7764-897-3.

God, Fear, Feeling, Sense

“No more of courts, of triumphs, or of arms,
No more of Valour’s force, or Beauty's charms!
The themes of vulgar lays with just disdain
I leave unsung, the flocks, the amorous swain,
The pleasures of the land, and terrors of the main.
How abject, how inglorious 'tis to lie
Grovelling in dust and darkness, when on high
Empires immense, and rolling worlds of light,
To range their heavenly scenes the muse invite!”

Richard Blackmore (1654–1729) English poet and physician

Book I, opening lines
Creation (1712)

Pleasure, Lie, World, Beauty

“The mirror by the door was not a mirror by the door, it was an altar where he stood for only a moment to put on his cap before going out. The red rocking chair was a rocking of his own hips as he sat in the kitchen. Still, there was nothing of his — his own — that she could find. It was as if she were afraid she had hallucinated him and needed proof to the contrary. His absence was everywhere, stinging everything, giving the furnishings primary colors, sharp outlines to the corners of rooms and gold light to the dust collecting on table tops. When he was there he pulled everything toward himself. Not only her eyes and all her senses but also inanimate things seemed to exist because of him, backdrops to his presence. Now that he had gone, these things, so long subdued by his presence, were glamorized in his wake.”

Toni Morrison book Sula

Sula (1973)

Color, Sense, Light

“Do you know what I need? A hammer built out of a starship. It just seems practical. Something like that would have dozens of uses around the home. All of them needlessly apocolyptic, probably, but when you've got a doom hammer, every problem is meaningless once the interstellar dust settles.”

Brian Clevinger (1978) writer

http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=060729

Home, Problem

“pure dust that is all
in all. Bless,
weightless Spirit. Drink
Caliban, push your tongue
heavy into the calyx.”

Denise Levertov (1923–1997) Poet

Conversation in Moscow, The Freeing of the Dust

Drink

“It was in the dust of the seigneurial archives that I discovered the frightful mysteries of the usurpations of the noble caste.”

François-Noël Babeuf (1760–1797) French political agitator and journalist of the French Revolutionary period

Ce fut dans la poussière des archives seigneuriales que je découvris les affreux mystères des usurpations de la caste noble.
[in Gracchus Babeuf avec les Egaux, Jean-Marc Shiappa, Les éditions ouvrières, 1991, 16, 27082 2892-7]
On feudalism

“It is very appropriate that from this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us time and again down through history. Let us rise to the call for freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.”

George Wallace (1919–1998) 45th Governor of Alabama

First Inaugural Speech as Governor of Alabama, (January 1963)
1960s

Love, People, History, Freedom

“There is a reason why I came back to this place—came back here instead of to Canelli, Barbaresco or Alba. It is almost certain that I was not born here; where I was born I don't know. There is not a house or a bit of ground or a handful of dust hereabouts of which I can say: "This was me before I was born."”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Incipit
The moon and the bonfire (1950)

Housing

“The Dyer backed away from him another step and stood watching him, the exaltation in his face clouding slowly over until it was replaced by a strange, heavy look; it was as if reasoning thought were laboring to break through the storm of words and feelings and visions that confused him. Finally he turned around without a word and began to run back down the road, into the haze of dust that had not yet settled on his tracks.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 6, "Lorbanery"

Feeling

“If you loved as I do, she earnestly replied, you would not have so nearly lost me — these scruples of false delicacy and pride would never thus have troubled you — you would have seen that the greatest worldly distinctions and discrepancies of rank, birth, and fortune are as dust in the balance compared with the unity of accordant thoughts and feelings, and truly loving, sympathising hearts and souls.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. LIII : Conclusion; Helen to Gilbert

Love, Feeling, Soul, Birth

“.. and Dr. Isaiah Williams, whose body was recovered from a ravine near San Pablo. Inquiries are being hampered by what an Army spokesman termed the obstinate attitude of the local people. “They won’t admit they know their left hands from their right,” he asserted. Here at home Senator Richard Howell (Rep., Col.) today launched a fierce attack on the quote chlorophyll addicts unquote who, he claims, are hamstringing American business, already staggering under the load of high unemployment and recession, by insisting that our manufacturers comply with regulations ignored by foreign competition. In Southern Italy rioting continues in many small towns formerly dependent on fishing. Meantime, dust storms in the Camargue...”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

.
January “AND IT GOES ON”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

People, Quotes, Home, Business

“The ruthless destruction of wild animals and the abuse of domestic animals is contrary to God’s purpose. Our relationship with the animal world is not one of warfare, but one of dominion. Wild and domestic in terms of God’s purpose. Finally we must say in terms of this text that man was created to live in a perfect world, in a good world, very good God commanded. To till and to keep it, man was formed out of the substance of the dust of the ground we are told in Genesis 2:7. Man is therefore earthbound, psychological and physically, dust thou art and unto dust thou returnest.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Creationism and Psychology (n. d.)

God, World, Art, Animals

“Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things.”

Thomas Browne book Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial

Source: Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial (1658), Chapter V

Art, Time

“Christianity - and that is its greatest merit - has somewhat mitigated that brutal Germanic love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then the ancient stony gods will rise from the forgotten debris and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and finally Thor with his giant hammer will jump up and smash the Gothic cathedrals.”

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic

"The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany" (1834)

Love, God, War, Rage

“I learned more about economics from one South Dakota dust storm than I did in all my years at college.”

Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978) Vice-President of the USA under Lyndon B. Johnson

Quoted in "THE CONGRESS: Education of a Senator," http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,780085,00.html Time magazine ( 17 January 1949 http://books.google.com/books?id=8-jVAAAAMAAJ&q=%22I+learned+more+about+economics+from+one+south+dakota+dust+storm+than+I+did+in+all+my+years+at+college%22&pg=PA14#v=onepage)

Learning

“What the Divine wants is for man to embody Him here, in the individual and in the collectivity… to realise God in life. The old system of yoga could not harmonise or unify Spirit and life; it dismissed the world as Maya or a transient play of God. The result has been a diminution of life-power and the decline of India. The Gita says, utsideyur ime loka na kuryam karma cedaham ["These peoples would crumble to pieces if I did not do actions," 3.24]. Truly 'these peoples' of India have gone to ruin. What kind of spiritual perfection is it if a few Sannyasins, Bairagis and Saddhus attain realisation and liberation, if a few Bhaktas dance in a frenzy of love, god-intoxication and Ananda, and an entire race, devoid of life, devoid of intelligence, sinks to the depths of extreme tamas?… But now the time has come to take hold of the substance instead of extending the shadow. We have to awaken the true soul of India and in its image fashion all works…. I believe that the main cause of India's weakness is not subjection, nor poverty, nor a lack of spirituality or Dharma, but a diminution of thought-power, the spread of ignorance in the motherland of Knowledge. Everywhere I see an inability or unwillingness to think… incapacity of thought or 'thought-phobia'…. The mediaeval period was a night, a time of victory for the man of ignorance; the modern world is a time of victory for the man of knowledge. It is the one who can fathom and learn the truth of the world by thinking more, searching more, labouring more, who will gain more Shakti. Look at Europe, and you will see two things: a wide limitless sea of thought and the play of a huge and rapid, yet disciplined force. The whole Shakti of Europe lies there. It is by virtue of this Shakti that she has been able to swallow the world, like our Tapaswins of old, whose might held even the gods of the universe in awe, suspense and subjection. People say that Europe is rushing into the jaws of destruction. I do not think so. All these revolutions, all these upsettings are the initial stages of a new creation….. We, however, are not worshippers of Shakti; we are worshippers of the easy way…. Our civilisation has become ossified, our Dharma a bigotry of externals, our spirituality a faint glimmer of light or a momentary wave of intoxication. So long as this state of things lasts, any permanent resurgence of India is impossible…. We have abandoned the sadhana of Shakti and so the Shakti has abandoned us…. You say what is needed is emotional excitement, to fill the country with enthusiasm. We did all that in the political field during the Swadeshi period; but all we did now lies in the dust…. Therefore I no longer wish to make emotional excitement, feeling and mental enthusiasm the base. I want to make a vast and heroic equality the foundation of my yoga; in all the activities of the being, of the adhar [vessel] based on that equality, I want a complete, firm and unshakable Shakti; over that ocean of Shakti I want the vast radiation of the sun of Knowledge and in that luminous vastness an established ecstasy of infinite love and bliss and oneness. I do not want tens of thousands of disciples; it will be enough if I can get as instruments of God a hundred complete men free from petty egoism. I have no faith in the customary trade of guru. I do not want to be a guru. What I want is that a few, awakened at my touch or at that of another, will manifest from within their sleeping divinity and realise the divine life. It is such men who will raise this country.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

April, 1920, Letter to Barin Ghose, Sri Aurobindo's brother, Translated from Bengali
India's Rebirth

Love, Life, Men, God

“To-day unbind the captive,
So only are ye unbound;
Lift up a people from the dust,
Trump of their rescue, sound!”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Boston Hymn, st. 17
1860s, May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)

People

“.. wherever you are, you find the sun, a blade of grass, the spirals of the dragonfly. Courage consists of staying at home, close to nature, which could not care less about our disasters. Each grain of dust contains the soul of something marvellous.”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

Miró admonished art-critic w:Georges Duthuit
1915 - 1940
Source: 'Où allez-vous Miró?' (Where do you go, Miró), Georges Duthuit in Cahiers d'Art 11, nos. 8-10, 1936

Art, Home, Soul, Courage

“Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and — sans End!”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

The Rubaiyat (1120)

Lie, Wine

“The world was dust, and dust it would become…I gave up cigarets for a few days. I bought a new rosary. I poured nickels and dimes into the Poor Box. I pitied the world.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

World, Box

“He had seen fire, but only when Ara, the lightning, had destroyed some great tree. That any creature of the jungle could produce the red-and-yellow fangs which devoured wood and left nothing but fine dust surprised Tarzan greatly, and why the black warrior had ruined his delicious repast by plunging it into the blighting heat was quite beyond him. Possibly Ara was a friend with whom the Archer was sharing his food.
But, be that as it may, Tarzan would not ruin good meat in any such foolish manner, so he gobbled down a great quantity of the raw flesh, burying the balance of the carcass beside the trail where he could find it upon his return.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 9 : Man and Man

Food, Tree

“Some people collect paperweights, or pre-Columbian figures, or old masters, or young mistresses, or tombstone rubbings, or five-minute recipes, or any of a thousand other things including bruises, most of them satisfying, depending on the genes and the bank account and where the heart lies.
My own collection is sunrises; and I find that they have their advantages. Sunrises are usually handsome, they can't possibly be dusted, and they take only a little room, so long as it has a window to see them from. Moreover, I can't give way to the urge to show off my collection to my friends. I can only talk about it, and they needn't listen.”

Peg Bracken (1918–2007) American writer

I Didn't Come Here to Argue, "The Sunrise Collector: What to Do till Your Horoscope Gets There," (1969), Fawcett Crest edition, page 37.

People, Way, Heart, Dependency

“Historically speaking, the first wave of the punk/new wave (approximately 1976-1983) was primarily a movement of creative abuse of hardly-ever-used consumer media technology. Parents (usually technophile Baby boomer dads) bought expensive equipment like 8-track recorders, Super-8 and Polaroid cameras and later VHS camcorders and only used it to "document" birthday parties and other eminently boring ceremonies. But the rebellious teens found interesting new things to do with the dust-collecting media tech, and it started one of the biggest DIY revolutions of the 20th century. So punk (years before cyperpunk) was a movement of youngsters goofing around with (aka appropriating) consumer tech.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

via Mental Floss http://mentalfloss.com/article/79393/traceroute-documentary-about-nerds-and-annihilation

Birthday, Parent, Baby

“We are but dust and shadow.”
Pulvis et umbra sumus.

Horace book Odes

Book IV, ode vii, line 16
Odes (c. 23 BC and 13 BC)

“Broadway — the great sluice that washes out the dust of the gold-mines of Gotham.”

O. Henry (1862–1910) American short story writer

"From Each According to His Ability"
The Voice of the City (1908)

“I'm sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my viols-da-gamba and walk off to some sweet village, where I can paint landskips [landscapes] and enjoy the fag - end of life in quietness and ease. But these fine ladies [very probably his wife and daughters] and their tea-drinkings, dancings, husband-huntings, &c, &c. &c., will fob me out of the last ten years, and I fear miss getting husbands too. But we can say nothing to these things you know, Jackson, we must jog on and be content with the jingling of the bells, only, d-[damned]-it I hate a dust, the kicking up a dust, and being confined in harness to follow the track whilst others ride in the waggon, under cover, stretching their legs in the straw at ease, and gazing at green trees and blue skies without half my 'Taste'. That's d-d [damned] hard. My comfort is I have five viols-da-gamba: three 'Jayes' and two 'Barak Normans”

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) English portrait and landscape painter

Adieu. 2 Quotes from Gainsborough's letter to his friend William Jackson of Exeter, from Bath, 4 June 1768; as cited in Thomas Gainsborough, by William T, Whitley https://ia800204.us.archive.org/6/items/thomasgainsborou00whitrich/thomasgainsborou00whitrich.pdf; New York, Charles Scribner's Sons – London, Smith, Elder & Co, Sept. 1915, p. 385 (Appendix A - Letter VIII) 1755 - 1769

Life, Hate, Fear, Drink

“Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night," he had said. "You must not try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses.”

Sherwood Anderson book Winesburg, Ohio

"Death"
Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

Love, Disappointment, Kiss, Tree

“The fact is, winding and dusting and fixing somebody else's clock is boring.”

Brian Hayes (scientist) (1900) American scientist, columnist and author

Source: Group Theory in the Bedroom (2008), Chapter 1, Clock Of Ages, p. 18

“We feel that we are surrounded by the congregated bones of the great men of past times, who have filled history with their deeds, and the earth with their renown. And yet it almost provokes a smile at the vanity of human ambition to see how they are crowded together and jostled in the dust; what parsimony is observed in doling out a scanty nook, a gloomy corner, a little portion of earth, to those whom, when alive, kingdoms could not satisfy, and how many shapes and forms and artifices are devised to catch the casual notice of the passenger, and save from forgetfulness for a few short years a name which once aspired to occupy ages of the world's thought and admiration.”

Washington Irving book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

"Westminster Abbey".
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820)

Men, Age, World, Smile

“Though man comes from the dust, sin is not a part of his nature. Man can overcome sin, and through repentance attain to at-one-ment with his Maker.”

Joseph H. Hertz (1872–1946) British rabbi

Genesis II, 7 (p. 7)
The Pentateuch and Haftorahs (one-volume edition, 1937, ISBN 0-900689-21-8

Nature, Parting

“Trey Spruance didn't want to tour for ages. And Dean Menta has always been our guitar-roadie during Angel Dust, and I remember him playing fantastically during soundchecks. During each gig, he was watching from the side of the stage, seeing Big Jim play stuff that he could play better.”

Mike Patton (1968) American singer

"Dangerous Jokers" - (Nieuwe Revu, 17-24 May 1995)

Age, Angels

“Law is not a mausoleum. It is not an antique to be taken down, dusted, admired and put back on the shelf. It is like an old but vigorous tree, having roots in history, yet continuously taking new grafts and putting out new sprouts and occasionally dropping dead wood. It is essentially a social process, the end product of which is justice and hence it must change with changing social values. Otherwise there will be estrangement between law and justice and law will cease to have legitimacy.”

P.N. Bhagwati

P.N. Bhagwati Motilal Padmapat v State of Uttar Pradesh AIR 1979 SC 621; 118 ITR 326.

Justice, Law, History, Tree

“Dust always blowing about the town,
Except when sea-fog laid it down,
And I was one of the children told
Some of the blowing dust was gold.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

1920s, A Peck of Gold (1926)

Children, Sea

“Beauty is everlasting
and dust is for a time.”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

"In Distrust of Merits" (1944)
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)

Beauty, Time

“This, think'st thou Dust intomb'd, or Ghosts regard?”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro (2nd ed. 1654), Virgil's Æneis

“Brother, even by my mother's dust, I charge you,
Do not betray me to your mirth or hate.”

John Ford (dramatist) (1586–1639) dramatist

Act I, sc. iii.
Tis Pity She's a Whore (1629-33?)

Hate

“Our life is our own to-day, to-morrow you will be dust, a shade, and a tale that is told. Live mindful of death; the hour flies.”
Nostrum est quod vivis, cinis et manes et fabula fies. vive memor leti, fugit hora.

Persius (34–62) ancient latin poet

Nostrum est
quod vivis, cinis et manes et fabula fies.
vive memor leti, fugit hora.
Satire V, line 151.
The Satires

Life, Death

“The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver--what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe--
Just a little white with the dust.”

Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) English poet

On Receiving News of the War (1914), Break of Day in the Trenches (1916)

Life, Pleasure, Sleep, Strong

“The landlady had white hair. Around her neck was a high net collar fitting tightly like a corset. She was in her seventies, a tall woman who increased her height by rising on tiptoe and peering at me over her glasses…She smiled with a smile that seemed to hurt her face, cracking it open with old lines that broke up the dry flesh around her mouth and cheeks…She was lonely, and so lost and still proud. One afternoon she took me to her apartment on the top floor. It was like walking into a well-dusted tomb…For two hours she talked of Bert, and Lord! how she loved that man, even in death, but he was not dead at all; he was in that apartment, watching over her, protecting her, daring me to hurt her…The tea was old. The sugar was old and lumpish. The tea cups were dusty, and somehow the tea tasted old and the little dried up cookies tasted of death. When I got up to leave, Bert followed me through the door and down the hall, daring me to think cynically of him.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Love, Death, Smile, Thinking

“We all come up a little short and we go down hard.
These days I spend my time skipping through the dark.
Through the empires of dust, I chant your name.
I am the hunter of invisible game.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Hunter of Invisible Game"
Song lyrics, High Hopes (2014)

Game, Time

“Look, here are we on this starry night staring into space, and I must say I feel as small as dust lying down here.”

Dave Matthews (1967) American singer-songwriter, musician and actor

Pig
Before These Crowded Streets (1998)

Feeling, Lying, Night

“I threw big cowardly Hall on his belly I straddled him and rooted both spurs onto his thighs he roared like a big calf attacked by dogs … I used to trip him and let him take a mouth ful of dust now and again as he was as helpless as a big guano after leaving a dead bullock or a horse.”

Ned Kelly (1855–1880) Australian bushranger

Jerilderie Letter (1879)

Dogs, Horse, Dead

“What does it mean, insane? A legal definition. What do I mean? I feel it, see it, but what is it? It is something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness…Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans…Their view; it is cosmic…They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles of space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again.”

Philip K. Dick book The Man in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle (1962)

Life, Feeling, Reality, Parting

“We write dust epitaphs for our vanquished enemies and watch them blow away in the desert wind.”

Paolo Bacigalupi (1972) American science fiction and fantasy writer

"The Pasho", Asimov's Science Fiction, September 2004

“When he finished packing, he walked out on to the third-floor porch of the barracks brushing the dust from his hands, a very neat and deceptively slim young man in the summer khakis that were still early morning fresh.”

James Jones book From Here to Eternity

First line. "Jones packs a hell of a lot into that first line. He tells you it's summer, he tells you it's morning, he tells you you're on an Army post with a soldier who's obviously leaving for someplace, and he gives you a thumbnail description of his hero. That's a good opening line." ~ Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) in Killer's Payoff (1958)
From Here to Eternity (1951)

Summer

“Let the universe have only two dimensions, and let it be the surface of an india rubber ball. It is only the surface that is the universe, not the ball itself. …Let there be specks of dust fixed to the surface to represent the different galactic systems. If the ball is inflated, the universe expands, and these specks of dust will recede from each other, their mutual distances, measured along the surface, will increase in the same rate as the radius of the ball. An observer in any one of the specks will see all the others receding from himself, but it does not follow that he is the centre of the universe. The universe (which is the surface of the ball, not the ball itself) has no centre.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932)

Universe

“Who knows who wrote that song of summer,
That blackbirds sing at dusk,
This is a song of colour,
Where sands sing in crimson, red and rust,
Then climb into bed and turn to dust.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Aerial (2005), A Sky of Honey (Disc 2)

Singing, Summer

““I think I know the real reason.”
“Which is?”
“Alcohol in the dust clouds. Goddamn stuff is everywhere. Any lousy species ever invents the telescope and the spectroscope and starts looking in between the stars, what do they find?” He knocked the glass on the table. “Loads of stuff, but much of it alcohol.” He drank from the glass. “Humanoids are the galaxy’s way of trying to get rid of all that alcohol.””

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter IX (p. 148).

Alcohol, Way, Star, Thinking

“If, as they say, some dust thrown in my eyes
Will keep my talk from getting overwise,
I'm not the one for putting off the proof.
Let it be overwhelming, off a roof
And round a corner, blizzard snow for dust,
And blind me to a standstill if it must.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Dust in the Eyes http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/dust-in-the-eyes/ (1928) 1920s

“For 800 years Hindusthan waged a relentless freedom struggle - probably the most stirring saga of crusade for national freedom witnessed anywhere on the face of this earth. From Maharana Kumbha to Maharana Pratap Simha and Rajasimha in Rajasthan, from Hakka and Bukka to Krishnadevaraya in the South, from Chhatrapati Shivaji to the Peshwas in Maharashtra, from the various martyr Gurus of the Sikhs including Guru Govind Singh to Banda Bairagi and Ranjit Singh in the Punjab, from Chhatrasal in Bundelkhand to Lachit Barphukan in Assam, countless captains of the war of independence piloted the ship of freedom and steered her through perilous tides and tempests. As a result of their ceaseless and crushing blows, the conquering, sword of Islam lay in dust, shattered to pieces.”

H.V. Sheshadri (1926–2005) Indian writer

Source: The Tragic Story of Partition (1982), p.1-2

War, Freedom

“I pitied one whose tattered dress
Was patched, and stained with dust and rain;
He smiled on me; I could not guess
The viewless spirit's wide domain.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

By Still Waters (1906)

Smile

“Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.”

W. H. Auden September 1, 1939

Source: September 1, 1939 (1939), Lines 89–99

World, Light, Despair, Night

“My last vestige of "hands-off religion" respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of September 11, 2001, followed by the "National Day of Prayer", when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King impersonation and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place.”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

"Time to Stand Up"
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

People, Faith, Religion, Problem

“Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

letter to wife Louie (Louisa Wanda Strentzel) (July 1888); published in William Federic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/life_and_letters/default.aspx (1924), chapter 15: Winning a Competence 1880s

Travel, Silence, Heart

“His grace,
Sit nature, fortune, motion, time and place. ]] From whence with grace and goodness compassed round,
He ruleth, blesseth, keepeth all he wrought,
Above the air, the fire, the sea and ground,
Our sense, our wit, our reason and our thought,
Where persons three, with power and glory crowned,
Are all one God, who made all things of naught,
Under whose feet, subjected to his grace,
Sit nature, fortune, motion, time and place.This is the place, from whence like smoke and dust
Of this frail world the wealth, the pomp and power,
He tosseth, tumbleth, turneth as he lust,
And guides our life, our death, our end and hour:
No eye, however virtuous, pure and just,
Can view the brightness of that glorious bower,
On every side the blessed spirits be,
Equal in joys, though differing in degree.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Sedea colà, dond'egli e buono e giusto
Dà legge al tutto, e 'l tutto orna e produce
Sovra i bassi confin del mondo angusto,
Ove senso o ragion non si conduce.
E della eternità nel trono augusto
Risplendea con tre lumi in una luce.
Ha sotto i piedi il Fato e la Natura,
Ministri umíli, e 'l moto, e chi 'l misura; E 'l loco, e quella che qual fumo o polve
La gloria di qua giuso e l'oro e i regni,
piace là su, disperde e volve:
Nè, Diva, cura i nostri umani sdegni.
Quivi ei così nel suo splendor s'involve,
Che v'abbaglian la vista anco i più degni;
D'intorno ha innumerabili immortali
Disegualmente in lor letizia eguali.
Canto IX, stanzas 56–57 (tr. Edward Fairfax)
Max Wickert's translation:
He sat where He gives laws both good and just
to all, and all creates, and all sets right,
above the low bounds of this world of dust,
beyond the reach of sense or reason's might;
enthroned upon Eternity, august,
He shines with three lights in a single light.
At His feet Fate and Nature humbly sit,
and Motion, and the Power that measures it,and Space, and Fate who like a powder will
all fame and gold and kingdoms here below,
as pleases Him on high, disperse or spill,
nor, goddess, cares she for our wrath or woe.
There He, enwrapped in His own splendour, still
blinds even worthiest vision with His glow.
All round Him throng immortals numberless,
unequally equal in their happiness.
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

Life, Death, God, World

“Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.”

Salman Rushdie book The Satanic Verses

The Satanic Verses (1988)

“Well, dust off your thinking caps
Solar powered plastic plants
Pretty pictures of things we ate
We are only what we hate
But in the long run we have found
Silent films are full of sound
Inaudibly free
Slow down everyone
You're moving too fast
Frames can't catch you when
You're moving like that”

Jack Johnson (musician) (1975) American musician

Inaudible Melodies.
Song lyrics, Brushfire Fairytales (2001)

Hate, Thinking

“Ba'athism died in Iraq last week. The sight of the oversized bronze head of Saddam rolling in the dust and being beaten with shoes by exuberant Iraqis is perhaps the most important image of Iraqi politics of the last 50 years. It was the end of the republic of fear. Two Iraqis with whom I was camping out in Washington, D. C., woke me up at 5 a. m. that day so we could watch the images of a free Iraq. Tears rolled down our cheeks uncontrollably.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"Thank you, America", New York Post (April 15, 2003)

Fear, Shoe, Tear

“For men use, if they have an evil turn, to write it in marble: and whoso doth us a good turn we write it in dust.”

Thomas More (1478–1535) English Renaissance humanist

Richard III and His Miserable End (1543)

Men, Evil

“When I was a fighting-man, the kettle-drums they beat,
The people scattered gold-dust before my horses feet;
But now I am a great king, the people hound my track
With poison in my wine-cup, and daggers at my back.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Phoenix on the Sword" (1932)

People, Wine, Horse, Fight

“If the Soul sees, after death, what passes on this earth, and watches over the welfare of those it loves, then must its greatest happiness consist in seeing the current of its beneficent influences widening out from age to age, as rivulets widen into rivers, and aiding to shape the destinies of individuals, families, States, the World; and its bitterest punishment, in seeing its evil influences causing mischief and misery, and cursing and afflicting men, long after the frame it dwelt in has become dust, and when both name and memory are forgotten.”

Albert Pike book Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. XIX : Grand Pontiff, p. 315

Love, Death, Men, Age

“Land of ancient India
Cradle of humanity, hail
Hail! revered motherland,
Whom centuries of brutal invasions
Have not yet buried
Under the dust of oblivion.
Hail! Fatherland of faith,
Of love, of poetry and of science,
May we hail a revival of thy past
In our Western future!”

Louis Jacolliot (1837–1890) French writer and lawyer

The Bible in India, as quoted in K. M. Talreja, Holy Vedas and Holy Bible: A Comparative Study https://books.google.com/books?id=9qkoAAAAYAAJ, New Delhi: Rashtriya Chetana Sangathan, 2000

Love, Faith, Science, Past

“Don't wish it away,
Don't look at it like it's forever.
Between you and me I could honestly say
That things can only get better.And while I'm away,
Dust out the demons inside.
And it won't be long before you and me run
To the place in our hearts where we hide.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues, written by Elton John, Bernie Taupin, and Davey Johnstone
Song lyrics, Too Low for Zero (1983)

Heart

“It was a bright September afternoon, and the streets of New York were brilliant with moving men…. He was pushed toward the ticket-office with the others, and felt in his pocket for the new five-dollar bill he had hoarded…. When at last he realized that he had paid five dollars to enter he knew not what, he stood stock-still amazed…. John… sat in a half-maze minding the scene about him; the delicate beauty of the hall, the faint perfume, the moving myriad of men, the rich clothing and low hum of talking seemed all a part of a world so different from his, so strangely more beautiful than anything he had known, that he sat in dreamland, and started when, after a hush, rose high and clear the music of Lohengrin's swan. The infinite beauty of the wail lingered and swept through every muscle of his frame, and put it all a-tune. He closed his eyes and grasped the elbows of the chair, touching unwittingly the lady's arm. And the lady drew away. A deep longing swelled in all his heart to rise with that clear music out of the dirt and dust of that low life that held him prisoned and befouled. If he could only live up in the free air where birds sang and setting suns had no touch of blood! Who had called him to be the slave and butt of all?… If he but had some master-work, some life-service, hard, aye, bitter hard, but without the cringing and sickening servility…. When at last a soft sorrow crept across the violins, there came to him the vision of a far-off home — the great eyes of his sister, and the dark drawn face of his mother…. It left John sitting so silent and rapt that he did not for some time notice the usher tapping him lightly on the shoulder and saying politely, 'will you step this way please sir?'… The manager was sorry, very very sorry — but he explained that some mistake had been made in selling the gentleman a seat already disposed of; he would refund the money, of course… before he had finished John was gone, walking hurriedly across the square… and as he passed the park he buttoned his coat and said, 'John Jones you're a natural-born fool.”

W.E.B. Du Bois book The Souls of Black Folk

Then he went to his lodgings and wrote a letter, and tore it up; he wrote another, and threw it in the fire....
Source: The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. XIII: Of the Coming of John

Life, Men, Money, World

“You have called upon us to expose ourselves to all the subtle machinations of their malignity for all time. And now, what do you propose to do when you come to make peace? To reward your enemies, and trample in the dust your friends? Do you intend to sacrifice the very men who have come to the rescue of your banner in the South, and incurred the lasting displeasure of their masters thereby? Do you intend to sacrifice them and reward your enemies? Do you mean to give your enemies the right to vote, and take it away from your friends? Is that wise policy? Is that honorable? Could American honor withstand such a blow? I do not believe you will do it. I think you will see to it that we have the right to vote. There is something too mean in looking upon the Negro, when you are in trouble, as a citizen, and when you are free from trouble, as an alien. When this nation was in trouble, in its early struggles, it looked upon the Negro as a citizen. In 1776 he was a citizen. At the time of the formation of the Constitution the Negro had the right to vote in eleven States out of the old thirteen. In your trouble you have made us citizens. In 1812 General Jackson addressed us as citizens; 'fellow-citizens'. He wanted us to fight. We were citizens then! And now, when you come to frame a conscription bill, the Negro is a citizen again. He has been a citizen just three times in the history of this government, and it has always been in time of trouble. In time of trouble we are citizens. Shall we be citizens in war, and aliens in peace? Would that be just?”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, What the Black Man Wants (1865)

Men, War, Peace, History