Quotes about earth

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pg. xx
Native Son (1940)

Main Street and Other Poems (1917), A Blue Valentine
Context: But, of your courtesy, Monsignore,
Do me this favour:
When you this morning make your way
To the Ivory Throne that bursts into bloom with roses
because of her who sits upon it,
When you come to pay your devoir to Our Lady,
I beg you, say to her:
"Madame, a poor poet, one of your singing servants yet on earth,
Has asked me to say that at this moment he is especially grateful to you
For wearing a blue gown."

Source: The Bridge Across Forever (1984), Ch. 48
Context: The things we own, the places we live, the events of our lives: empty settings. How easy to chase after settings, and forget diamonds! The only thing that matters, at the end of a stay on earth, is how well did we love, what was the quality of our love?

The Analects, The Doctrine of the Mean
Context: The way which the superior man pursues, reaches wide and far, and yet is secret. Common men and women, however ignorant, may intermeddle with the knowledge of it; yet in its utmost reaches, there is that which even the sage does not know. Common men and women, however much below the ordinary standard of character, can carry it into practice; yet in its utmost reaches, there is that which even the sage is not able to carry into practice. Great as heaven and earth are, men still find some things in them with which to be dissatisfied. Thus it is that, were the superior man to speak of his way in all its greatness, nothing in the world would be found able to embrace it, and were he to speak of it in its minuteness, nothing in the world would be found able to split it.

Part IV: Personal and Philosophical Essays, Ch. 24 : "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil" (1972)
The Scientist As Rebel (2006)
Context: I have to clear away a few popular misconceptions about space as a habitat … It is generally considered that planets are important. Except for Earth, they are not. Mars is waterless, and the others are, for various reasons, basically inhospitable to man. It is generally considered that beyond the sun’s family of planets there is absolute emptiness extending for light-years until you come to another star. In fact, it is likely that the space around the solar system is populated by huge numbers of comets, small worlds a few miles in diameter, rich in water and the other chemicals essential to life.

A Few Thoughts for a Young Man (1850)
Context: The laws of nature are sublime, but there is a moral sublimity before which the highest intelligences must kneel and adore. The laws by which the winds blow, and the tides of the ocean, like a vast clepsydra, measure, with inimitable exactness, the hours of ever-flowing time; the laws by which the planets roll, and the sun vivifies and paints; the laws which preside over the subtle combinations of chemistry, and the amazing velocities of electricity; the laws of germination and production in the vegetable and animal worlds, — all these, radiant with eternal beauty as they are, and exalted above all the objects of sense, still wane and pale before the Moral Glories that apparel the universe in their celestial light. The heart can put on charms which no beauty of known things, nor imagination of the unknown, can aspire to emulate. Virtue shines in native colors, purer and brighter than pearl, or diamond, or prism, can reflect. Arabian gardens in their bloom can exhale no such sweetness as charity diffuses. Beneficence is godlike, and he who does most good to his fellow-man is the Master of Masters, and has learned the Art of Arts. Enrich and embellish the universe as you will, it is only a fit temple for the heart that loves truth with a supreme love. Inanimate vastness excites wonder; knowledge kindles admiration, but love enraptures the soul. Scientific truth is marvellous, but moral truth is divine; and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light, has found the lost paradise. For him, a new heaven and a new earth have already been created. His home is the sanctuary of God, the Holy of Holies. <!-- p. 35

Everything About It Is a Love Song
Song lyrics, Surprise (2006)
Context: I shoot a thought into the future, and it flies like an arrow, through my lifetime. And beyond.
If I ever come back as a tree, or a crow, or even the wind-blown dust; find me on the ancient road in the song when the wires are hushed. Hurry on and remember me, as I'll remember you. Far above the golden clouds, the darkness vibrates.
The earth is blue.
And everything about it is a love song. Everything about it.

Preface to Humane Biology Projects (1961) by the Animal Welfare Institute
Context: I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future. To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from which it came; it is to understand that the stream of life, flowing out of the dim past into the uncertain future, is in reality a unified force, though composed of an infinite number and variety of separate lives.

Source: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), p. 277-278.
Context: Few will doubt that humankind has created a planet-sized problem for itself. No one wished it so, but we are the first species to become a geophysical force, altering Earth's climate, a role previously reserved for tectonics, sun flares, and glacial cycles. We are also the greatest destroyer of life since the ten-kilometer-wide meteorite that landed near Yucatan and ended the Age of Reptiles sixty-five million years ago. Through overpopulation we have put ourselves in danger of running out of food and water. So a very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.

Stanza 1.
1710s, Psalm 98 "Joy to the World!" (1719)
Context: Joy to the world! the Lord is come;
Let earth receive her King.
Let ev'ry heart prepare Him room,
And heav'n and nature sing,
And heaven and nature sing,
And heaven, and heaven, and nature sing.

Torsten Manns interview <!-- p. 40 -->
Bergman on Bergman (1970)
Context: Now let's get this Devil business straight, once and for all. To begin at the beginning: the notion of God, one might say, has changed aspect over the years, until it has either become so vague that it has faded away altogether or else has turned into something entirely different. For me, hell has always been a most suggestive sort of place; but I've never regarded it as being located anywhere else than on earth. Hell is created by human beings — on earth!
What I believed in those days — and believed in for a long time — was the existence of a virulent evil, in no way dependent upon environmental or hereditary factors. Call it original sin or whatever you like — anyway an active evil, of which human beings, as opposed to animals, have a monopoly. Our very nature, qua human beings, is that inside us we always carry around destructive tendencies, conscious or unconscious, aimed both at ourselves and at the outside world.
As a materialization of this virulent, indestructible, and — to us — inexplicable and incomprehensble evil, I manufactured a personage possessing the diabolical traits of a mediaeval morality figure. In various contexts I'd made it into a sort of private game to have a diabolic figure hanging around. His evil was one of the springs in my watch-works. And that's all there is to the devil-figure in my early films... Unmotivated cruelty is something which never ceases to fascinate me; and I'd very much like to know the reason for it. Its source is obscure and I'd very much like to get at it.

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Context: The question to be tried by you is whether a man has the right to express his honest thought; and for that reason there can be no case of greater importance submitted to a jury. And it may be well enough for me, at the outset, to admit that there could be no case in which I could take a greater — a deeper interest. For my part, I would not wish to live in a world where I could not express my honest opinions. Men who deny to others the right of speech are not fit to live with honest men.
I deny the right of any man, of any number of men, of any church, of any State, to put a padlock on the lips — to make the tongue a convict. I passionately deny the right of the Herod of authority to kill the children of the brain.
A man has a right to work with his hands, to plow the earth, to sow the seed, and that man has a right to reap the harvest. If we have not that right, then all are slaves except those who take these rights from their fellow-men.

Sarkis an old Greek Shepherd, called the madman: Jesus and Pan
Jesus, The Son of Man (1928)
Context: "And now let us play our reeds together."
And they played together.
And their music smote heaven and earth, and a terror struck all living things.
I heard the bellow of beasts and the hunger of the forest. And I heard the cry of lonely men, and the plaint of those who long for what they know not.
I heard the sighing of the maiden for her lover, and the panting of the luckless hunter for his prey.
And then there came peace into their music, and the heavens and the earth sang together.
All this I saw in my dream, and all this I heard.

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 83

Nobel Peace prize acceptance speech (1985)
Context: I recall the telegram I received at the time of our first Congress from an ordinary woman in Brooklyn. It was short: "Thank you on behalf of the children."
As adults we are obliged to avert transformation of the Earth from a flourishing planet into a heap of smoking ruins. Our duty is to hand it over to our successors in a better state than it was inherited by us. Therefore, it is not for fame, but for the happiness and for the future of all mothers and children that we — the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War — have worked, are working and will work.

Sermons
Context: When the spirit looks within, to the Spirit of God, from the ground of the heart,
where man, empty and bare of all works, seeks God only,
far above all thoughts, works and reason,
it is truly a thorough conversion, which will ever be met with a corresponding reward,
and God will be with him.
Another conversion may take place in an ordinary external way, whenever man turns to God,
thinking wholly and entirely of Him,
and of nothing else but of God for Himself and in Himself.
But the first turning is in an inner, undefined, unknown presence,
in an immaterial entrance of the created spirit into the uncreated Spirit of God.
If a man could only once in his life thus turn to God, it would be well for him.
Those [[File:Antennae galaxies xl. jpg|154px|thumb|He draws them so mysteriously unto Himself and His own blessedness;
their spirits are so lovingly attracted, while they are at the same time so filled and transfused with the Godhead,
that they lose all their diversity in the Unity of the Godhead]] men whose God is so powerful, and Who has been so faithful to them in all their distress,
will be answered by God with Himself.
He draws them so mysteriously unto Himself and His own blessedness;
their spirits are so lovingly attracted, while they are at the same time so filled and transfused with the Godhead,
that they lose all their diversity in the Unity of the Godhead.
These are they to whom God makes their work here on earth a delight;
so that they have a real foretaste of that which they will enjoy forever.
These are they on whom the Holy Christian Church rests;
and, if they did not form part of Christianity, Christianity could no longer exist;
for their mere existence, what they are, is infinitely worthier and more useful than all the doings of the world.
These are they of whom our Lord has said:
“He that toucheth you, toucheth the apple of Mine eye.”
Therefore, take heed that ye do them no wrong. May God help us.

22 min 35 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Who Speaks for Earth? [Episode 13]
Context: Our global civilisation is clearly on the edge of failure and the most important task it faces, preserving the lives and well-being of its citizens and the future habitability of the planet. But if we're willing to live with the growing likelihood of nuclear war shouldn't we also been willing to explore vigorously every possible means to prevent nuclear war. Shouldn't we consider in every nation major changes in the traditional ways of doing things, a fundamental restructuring of economic political social and religious institutions. We've reached a point where there can be no more special interests or special cases, nuclear arms threaten every person on the Earth. Fundamental changes in society are sometimes labelled impractical or contrary to human nature, as if nuclear war were practical or as if there's only one human nature. But fundamental changes can clearly be made, we're surrounded by them. In the last two centuries abject slavery which was with us for thousands of years has almost entirely been eliminated in a stirring worldwide revolution. Women, systematically mistreated for millennia are gradually gaining the political and economic power traditionally denied them and some wars of aggression have recently been stopped or curtailed because of a revulsion felt by the people in the aggressor nations. The old appeals to racial, sexual, and religious chauvinism and to rabid nationalist fervor are beginning not to work. A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.

Whoops! It's Christmas (1959)
Context: The central core of truth is that Christmas turns everything upside down, the upside of heaven come down to earth. The Christmas story puts a new value on every man. He is not a thing to be used, not a chemical accident, not an educated ape. Every man is a V. I. P., because he has divine worth. That was revealed when "Love came down at Christmas." A scientist said, making a plea for exchange scholarships between nations, "The best way to send an idea is to wrap it up in a person." That was what happened at Christmas. The idea of divine love was wrapped up in a person.

The Daydream: L'Envoi, lines 231-32, from The Complete Works of Alfred Tennyson (1879)

Source: The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 21
Context: It is a significant fact and worth pondering upon that the Bible commences with the words: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth....", while the Dhammapada … opens with the words "Mind precedes things, dominates them, creates them". These momentous words are the quiet and uncontending, but unshakeable reply of the Buddha to that biblical belief. Here the roads of these two religions part: the one leads far away into an imaginary Beyond, the other leads straight home, into man's very heart.

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)
Context: A solemn sadness reigns. A great peace is around us. In its light our cares of the working day grow small and trivial, and bread and cheese—ay, and even kisses—do not seem the only things worth striving for. Thoughts we cannot speak but only listen to flood in upon us, and standing in the stillness under earth's darkening dome, we feel that we are greater than our petty lives. Hung round with those dusky curtains, the world is no longer a mere dingy workshop, but a stately temple wherein man may worship, and where at times in the dimness his groping hands touch God's.

54 min 55 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Journeys in Space and Time [Episode 8]
Context: Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours and every one of them is a succession of incidents, events, occurrences which influence its future. Countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time. And our small planet at this moment, here we face a critical branch point in history, what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants, it is well within our power to destroy our civilization and perhaps our species as well. If we capitulate to superstition or greed or stupidity we could plunge our world into a time of darkness deeper than the time between the collapse of classical civilization and the Italian Renaissance. But we are also capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet.

D-503
We (1921)

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)
Context: As a consequence of the slavish "categoryitis" the scientifically illogical, and as we shall see, often meaningless questions "Where do you live?" "What are you?" "What religion?" "What race?" "What nationality?" are all thought of today as logical questions. By the twenty-first century it either will have become evident to humanity that these questions are absurd and anti-evolutionary or men will no longer be living on Earth.

Bk. III, ch. 8.
1830s, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)
Context: But deepest of all illusory Appearances, for hiding Wonder, as for many other ends, are your two grand fundamental world-enveloping Appearances, SPACE and TIME. These, as spun and woven for us from before Birth itself, to clothe our celestial ME for dwelling here, and yet to blind it, — lie all-embracing, as the universal canvas, or warp and woof, whereby all minor Illusions, in this Phantasm Existence, weave and paint themselves. In vain, while here on Earth, shall you endeavor to strip them off; you can, at best, but rend them asunder for moments, and look through.

This I Believe (1951)
Context: My favorite story on this subject is the one that was being whispered in Moscow when I was assigned there for CBS back in 1943. It concerns a hapless individual, running down the street in a Russian village, his clothing flung over one arm and a loaf of bread tucked under the other. "Pavel," a friend calls, "where are you running to?" "Haven't you heard?" Pavel replies. "Tomorrow they're going to sterilize all kangaroos." "But there are no kangaroos in the Ukraine," the friend declares. "Yes," answers Pavel, "but can you prove that you’re not one?" I am personally ashamed that men have to prove that they are not “kangaroos.” When bigots attack a colored man, I ashamed that my skin also is white. During the War, in Amsterdam, I felt shame because a starving mother wept over a can of beans for her child. I was ashamed of my fat. And on D-Day, and again later in Korea, I had a sense of shame at being alive when so many around me had to die. When this kind of shame is banished from the Earth, then perhaps we will have that civilization man has been striving for, for so many centuries.

Source: The Revolt of the Angels (1914), Ch. XXXV
Context: Satan, piercing space with his keen glance, contemplated the little globe of earth and water where of old he had planted the vine and formed the first tragic chorus. And he fixed his gaze on that Rome where the fallen God had founded his empire on fraud and lie. Nevertheless, at that moment a saint ruled over the Church. Satan saw him praying and weeping. And he said to him:
"To thee I entrust my Spouse. Watch over her faithfully. In thee I confirm the right and power to decide matters of doctrine, to regulate the use of the sacraments, to make laws and to uphold purity of morals. And the faithful shall be under obligation to conform thereto. My Church is eternal, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Thou art infallible. Nothing is changed."
And the successor of the apostles felt flooded with rapture. He prostrated himself, and with his forehead touching the floor, replied:
"O Lord, my God, I recognise Thy voice! Thy breath has been wafted like balm to my heart. Blessed be Thy name. Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."

Dedication
Casuals of the Sea (1916)
Context: To those who live and toil and lowly die,
Who past beyond and leave no lasting trace,
To those from whom our queen Prosperity
Has turned away her fair and fickle face;
To those frail craft upon the restless Sea
Of Human Life, who strike the rocks uncharted,
Who loom, sad phantoms, near us, drearily,
Storm-driven, rudderless, with timbers started;
To those poor Casuals of the way-worn earth,
The feckless wastage of our cunning schemes,
This book is dedicate, their hidden worth
And beauty I have seen in vagrant dreams!
The things we touch, the things we dimly see,
The stiff strange tapestries of human thought,
The silken curtains of our fantasy
Are with their sombre histories o'erwrought.
And yet we know them not, our skill is vain to find
The mute soul's agony, the visions of the blind.

Orthodoxy (1884).
Context: Love is the only bow on Life's dark cloud. It is the morning and the evening star. It shines upon the babe, and sheds its radiance on the quiet tomb. It is the mother of art, inspirer of poet, patriot and philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart — builder of every home, kindler of every fire on every hearth. It was the first to dream of immortality. It fills the world with melody — for music is the voice of love. Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to Joy, and makes royal kings and queens of common clay. It is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it, earth is heaven, and we are gods.

Speech in Springfield Illinois (24 October 1952)
Context: I do not believe it is man's destiny to compress this once boundless earth into a small neighborhood, the better to destroy it. Nor do I believe it is in the nature of man to strike eternally at the image of himself, and therefore of God. I profoundly believe that there is on this horizon, as yet only dimly perceived, a new dawn of conscience. In that purer light, people will come to see themselves in each other, which is to say they will make themselves known to one another by their similarities rather than by their differences. Man's knowledge of things will begin to be matched by man's knowledge of self. The significance of a smaller world will be measured not in terms of military advantage, but in terms of advantage for the human community. It will be the triumph of the heartbeat over the drumbeat.
These are my beliefs and I hold them deeply, but they would be without any inner meaning for me unless I felt that they were also the deep beliefs of human beings everywhere. And the proof of this, to my mind, is the very existence of the United Nations.

“Shadows from the Big Woods”, p. 225
The Journey Home (1977)
Context: The earth is not a mechanism but an organism, a being with its own life and its own reasons, where the support and sustenance of the human animal is incidental. If man in his newfound power and vanity persists in the attempt to remake the planet in his own image, he will succeed only in destroying himself — not the planet. The earth will survive our most ingenious folly.

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet
Context: We are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a greatness, composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat, — the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish. The yellow wheat is growing there; the good Earth is silent about all the rest, — has silently turned all the rest to some benefit too, and makes no complaint about it! So everywhere in Nature! She is true and not a lie; and yet so great, and just, and motherly in her truth. She requires of a thing only that it be genuine of heart; she will protect it if so; will not, if not so. There is a soul of truth in all the things she ever gave harbor to. Alas, is not this the history of all highest Truth that comes or ever came into the world?

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 32-33
Context: There is nothing at all singular or special in the astronomical situation of the earth. It takes its place third in a series of planets, which series is only one of numberless other systems forming one group. It is strikingly-if I may use such an expression-a member of a democracy. Hence, we cannot suppose that there is any peculiarity about it which does not probably attach to multitudes of other bodies—in fact, to all that are analogous to it in respect of cosmical arrangements.

"Counter-Attack"
The Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918)
Context: Mute in the clamour of shells he watched them burst
Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell,
While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke.
He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear,
Sick for escape,— loathing the strangled horror
And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Context: Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
Of the torches wisping in the underground,
Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.
There are no shadows in our sun,
Day is desire and night is sleep.
There are no shadows anywhere.
The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows.

A Man From Lebanon: Nineteen Centuries Afterward
Jesus, The Son of Man (1928)
Context: Here and there, betwixt the cradle and the coffin, I meet your silent brothers,
The free men, unshackled,
Sons of your mother earth and space.
They are like the birds of the sky,
And like the lilies of the field.
They live your life and think your thoughts,
And they echo your song.
But they are empty-handed,
And they are not crucified with the great crucifixion,
And therein is their pain.
The world crucifies them every day,
But only in little ways.
The sky is not shaken,
And the earth travails not with her dead.

Source: The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science (1999), Ch.7 The Rape of Nature
Context: In four centuries of taking wealth and comfort from the body of the Earth, modern science has not troubled to produce a single rite or ritual, not even a minor prayer, that asks pardon or gives thanks. But then what sense would it make to ask anything of a dead body?

Secretum Meum (1342), as translated in Petrarch's Secret : or, The Soul's Conflict with Passion : Three Dialogues Between Himself and St. Augustine (1911) edited by William Henry Draper

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 311
Context: Now, as the inferior animals were all in being before man, there was language upon earth long ere the history of our race commenced. The only additional fact in the history of language, which was produced by our creation, was the rise of a new mode of expression—namely that by sound-signs produced by the vocal organs. In other words, speech was the only novelty in this respect attending the creation of the human race.

The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child (1877)
Context: There has never been upon the earth a generation of free men and women. It is not yet time to write a creed. Wait until the chains are broken — until dungeons are not regarded as temples. Wait until solemnity is not mistaken for wisdom — until mental cowardice ceases to be known as reverence. Wait until the living are considered the equals of the dead — until the cradle takes precedence of the coffin. Wait until what we know can be spoken without regard to what others may believe. Wait until teachers take the place of preachers — until followers become investigators. Wait until the world is free before you write a creed.
In this creed there will be but one word — Liberty.

Lila (1991)
Context: The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all energy systems run down like a clock and never rewind themselves. But life not only 'runs up,' converting low energy sea-water, sunlight and air into high-energy chemicals, it keeps multiplying itself into more and better clocks that keep 'running up' faster and faster. Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive? If we leave a chemistry professor out on a rock in the sun long enough the forces of nature will convert him into simple compounds of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and small amounts of other minerals. It's a one-way reaction. No matter what kind of chemistry professor we use and no matter what process we use we can't turn these compounds back into a chemistry professor. Chemistry professors are unstable mixtures of predominantly unstable compounds which, in the exclusive presence of the sun's heat, decay irreversibly into simpler organic and inorganic compounds. That's a scientific fact. The question is: Then why does nature reverse this process? What on earth causes the inorganic compounds to go the other way? It isn't the sun's energy. We just saw what the sun's energy did. It has to be something else. What is it?

Source: The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Ch. 1 First lines.
Context: The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors.

Chpt.2, p. 11
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1
Context: We learn particularly from the Timaeus of Plato, that the Egyptians believed the world to be subject to occasional conflagrations and deluges, whereby the gods arrested the career of human wickedness, and purified the earth from guilt. After each regeneration, mankind were in a state of virtue and happiness, from which they gradually degenerated again into vice and immorality. From this Egyptian doctrine, the poets derived the fable of the decline from the golden to the iron age.

Tragedy and Triumph of Reason (1985)
Context: Nuclear war, unless it is prevented, would lead to the extinction of life on Earth and possibly in the Universe. Can we take such a risk?
In our medical practice when we deal with a critical patient in order to save him, we mobilize all our energies and knowledge, sacrifice part of our hearts and enlist the cooperation of our most experienced colleagues. Today we face a seriously ill humanity, torn apart by distrust and fear of nuclear war. To save it we must arouse the conscience of the world's peoples, cultivate hatred for nuclear weapons, repudiate egoism and chauvinism, and create favorable atmosphere of trust. In the nuclear age we are all interdependent. The Earth is our only common home which we cannot abandon. The new suicidal situation calls for the new thinking. We must convince those who take political decisions.
Our professional duty is to protect life on Earth. True to the Hippocratic Oath, physicians will dedicate their knowledge, their hearts and their lives to the happiness of their patients and the well-being of the peoples of the world.

Autobiography of Values (1978)
Context: I grow aware of various forms of man and of myself. I am form and I am formless, I am life and I am matter, mortal and immortal. I am one and many — myself and humanity in flux. I extend a multiple of ways in experience in space. I am myself now, lying on my back in the jungle grass, passing through the ether between satellites and stars. My aging body transmits an ageless life stream. Molecular and atomic replacement change life's composition. Molecules take part in structure and in training, countless trillions of them. After my death, the molecules of my being will return to the earth and sky. They came from the stars. I am of the stars.

"Evolution and Religion", The New York Times (5 March 1922), p. 91; written in response to an article a few days earlier in which William Jennings Bryan challenged the theory of evolution as lacking proof.
Context: Direct observation of the testimony of the earth... is a matter of the laboratory, of the field naturalist, of indefatigable digging among the ancient archives of the earth's history. If Mr. Bryan, with an open heart and mind, would drop all his books and all the disputations among the doctors and study first hand the simple archives of Nature, all his doubts would disappear; he would not lose his religion; he would become an evolutionist.

Interview in Speaking of Science Fiction: The Paul Walker Interviews (1978)
Context: When I talk of the purpose of life, I am thinking not only of human life, but of all life on Earth and of the life which must exist upon other planets throughout the universe. It is only of life on Earth, however, that one can speak with any certainty. It seems to me that all life on Earth, the sum total of life upon the Earth, has purpose. If the means were available, we could trace our ancestry — yours and mine — back to the first blob of life-like material that came into being on the planet. The same thing could be done for the spider that spun his web in the grass, and of the grass in which the web was spun, the bird sitting in the tree and the tree in which he sits, the toad waiting for the fly beneath the bush, and for the fly and bush. We are all genetic brothers. The chain of life, tracing back to that primordial day of life's beginning, is unbroken...

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1937/mar/17/the-late-sir-austen-chamberlain in the House of Commons upon the death of Sir Austen Chamberlain (17 March 1937).
1937
Context: In the remote parts of that countryside where I was born and where old English phrases linger, though they may now be dying, even now I hear among those old people this phrase about those who die "He has gone home." It was a universal phrase among the old agricultural labourers, whose life was one toil from their earliest days to their last, and I think that that phrase must have arisen from the sense that one day the toil would be over and the rest would come, and that rest, the cessation of toil, wherever that occurred would be home. So they say, "He has gone home." When our long days of work are over here there is nothing in our oldest customs which so stirs the imagination of the young Member as the cry which goes down the Lobbies, "Who goes home?" Sometimes when I hear it I think of the language of my own countryside and my feeling that for those who have borne the almost insupportable burden of public life there may well be a day when they will be glad to go home. So Austen Chamberlain has gone home.... he had an infinite faith in the Parliamentary system of this country. Let us resolve once more that we can best keep his memory bright by confirming our own resolution that government of the people by the people shall never perish on this earth.

Upon the Sovereign Sun (362)
Context: Unto men Athene gives good things — namely, wisdom, understanding, and the creative arts; and she dwells in their citadels, I suppose, as being the founder of civil government through the communication of her own wisdom.
Now for a few words about Aphrodite, whom the Phoenician theologians agree in making co-operate in the work of creation with the last-mentioned goddess — and I believe they are right. She, then, is the mingling together of the celestial deities, and of the harmony of the same, for the purposes of love and unification. For she being near to the Sun, and running her course together with him, and approaching close to him, she fills the heavens with a good temperament, she imparts to the earth the generative power, whilst she herself provides for the perpetuity of generation of animals, of which generation the Sovereign Sun contains the final efficient cause. She, however, is joint cause with him, enthralling our souls by the aid of pleasure, whilst she sheds down from the aether upon the earth her rays so delightful and pure, more lustrous than gold itself.

The Sun My Heart (1996)
Context: Interpenetration is an important teaching, but it still suggests that things outside of one another penetrate into each other. Interbeing is a step forward. We are already inside, so we don't have to enter. In contemporary nuclear physics, people talk about implicit order and explicit order. In the explicit order, things exist outside of each other — the table outside of the flower, the sunshine outside of the cypress tree. In the implicit order, we see that they are inside each other — the sunshine inside the cypress tree. Interbeing is the implicit order. To practice mindfulness and to look deeply into the nature of things is to discover the true nature of interbeing. There we find peace and develop the strength to be in touch with everything. With this understanding, we can easily sustain the work of loving and caring for the Earth and for each other for a long time.

No Coward Soul Is Mine (1846)
Context: p>With wide-embracing love
Thy Spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.Though earth and moon were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee. There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou — Thou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed.</p

Letter to Mary Bishop, an important Methodist "Class Meeting" leader, https://books.google.com/books?id=E-iMVOU6PhYC&pg=PA33&lpg=PA33&dq=%22one+of+his+leading+women+class+leaders,%22&source=bl&ots=TjalEPj1rz&sig=MGwiThaIzWLfs6AWUzta-aZNBUk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiX3oyws6_TAhVHRyYKHbRvCv8Q6AEIJDAA#v=onepage&q=%22one%20of%20his%20leading%20women%20class%20leaders%2C%22&f=false (12 June 1773), in The works of the Rev. John Wesley, Seven Volumes, (1853), Carlton & Phillips, New York, vol. VII, p. 164. https://books.google.com/books?id=P4QsAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA164&dq=It+has+in+all+ages+been+allowed+that+the+communion+of+saints+extends+to+those+in+paradise&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjejuPcrq_TAhWG0iYKHefIDYwQ6AEIJDAA#v=onepage&q=It%20has%20in%20all%20ages%20been%20allowed%20that%20the%20communion%20of%20saints%20extends%20to%20those%20in%20paradise&f=false
General sources
Context: It has in all ages been allowed that the communion of saints extends to those in paradise as well as those upon earth as they are all one body united under one Head. And "Can death’s interposing tide / Spirits one in Christ divide?" But it is difficult to say either what kind or what degree of union may be between them. It is not improbable their fellowship with us is far more sensible than ours with them. Suppose any of them are present, they are hid from our eyes, but we are not hid from their sight. They no doubt clearly discern all our words and actions, if not all our thoughts too; for it is hard to think these walls of flesh and blood can intercept the view of an angelic being. But we have in general only a faint and indistinct perception of their presence, unless in some peculiar instances, where it may answer some gracious ends of Divine Providence. Then it may please God to permit that they should be perceptible, either by some of our outward senses or by an internal sense for which human language has not any name. But I suppose this is not a common blessing. I have known but few instances of it. To keep up constant and close communion with God is the most likely means to obtain this also.

Black Boy (1945)

Poems and Ballads (1866-89), The Triumph of Time
Context: The loves and hours of the life of a man,
They are swift and sad, being born of the sea.
Hours that rejoice and regret for a span,
Born with a man's breath, mortal as he;
Loves that are lost ere they come to birth,
Weeds of the wave, without fruit upon earth.
I lose what I long for, save what I can,
My love, my love, and no love for me!

Christ, Old Student in a New School (1972)
Context: Ten thousand times a million sons of sons move
Through one great and towering town
Wearing their wits, which means their laughter,
As their crown. Set free upon the earth
By simple gifts of knowing how mere mirth can cut the bonds
And pull the blood spikes out;
Their conversation shouts of "Fool!"

Unpublished Sonnet (originally written as a preface to Becket), in Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, by Hallam T. Tennyson (1897)

"O Russet Witch!"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
Context: Merlin went up-stairs very quietly at nine o'clock. When he was in his room and had closed the door tight he stood by it for a moment, his thin limbs trembling. He knew now that he had always been a fool.
"O Russet Witch!"
But it was too late. He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.

The Analects, The Doctrine of the Mean
Context: It is only the individual possessed of the most entire sincerity that can exist under Heaven, who can adjust the great invariable relations of mankind, establish the great fundamental virtues of humanity, and know the transforming and nurturing operations of Heaven and Earth; — shall this individual have any being or anything beyond himself on which he depends? Call him man in his ideal, how earnest is he! Call him an abyss, how deep is he! Call him Heaven, how vast is he! Who can know him, but he who is indeed quick in apprehension, clear in discernment, of far-reaching intelligence, and all-embracing knowledge, possessing all Heavenly virtue?

Context: For four hundred years the human race has not made a step but what has left its plain vestige behind. We enter now upon great centuries. The sixteenth century will be known as the age of painters, the seventeenth will be termed the age of writers, the eighteenth the age of philosophers, the nineteenth the age of apostles and prophets. To satisfy the nineteenth century, it is necessary to be the painter of the sixteenth, the writer of the seventeenth, the philosopher of the eighteenth; and it is also necessary, like Louis Blane, to have the innate and holy love of humanity which constitutes an apostolate, and opens up a prophetic vista into the future. In the twentieth century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, animosity will be dead, royalty will be dead, and dogmas will be dead; but Man will live. For all there will be but one country—that country the whole earth; for all there will be but one hope—that hope the whole heaven.

Address to the Workman's Congress at Marseille http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Victor_Hugo%27s_Address_to_the_Workman%27s_Congress_at_Marseille (1879)

Comments to Prof. David F. Boyd at the Louisiana State Seminary (24 December 1860), as quoted in The Civil War : A Book of Quotations (2004) by Robert Blaisdell. Also quoted in The Civil War: A Narrative (1986) by Shelby Foote, p. 58.
1860s, 1860
Context: You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it … Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.

Source: A Dream of John Ball (1886), Ch. 4: The Voice of John Ball
Context: Forsooth, ye have heard it said that ye shall do well in this world that in the world to come ye may live happily for ever; do ye well then, and have your reward both on earth and in heaven; for I say to you that earth and heaven are not two but one; and this one is that which ye know, and are each one of you a part of, to wit, the Holy Church, and in each one of you dwelleth the life of the Church, unless ye slay it.

Unity, § II
The Golden Hynde and Other Poems (1914)
Context: Heart of my heart, we cannot die!
Love triumphant in flower and tree,
Every life that laughs at the sky
Tells us nothing can cease to be:
One, we are one with the song to-day,
One with the clover that scents the world,
One with the Unknown, far away,
One with the stars, when earth grows old.

As quoted in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (1979) by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow
Context: I am a witch, by which I mean that I am somebody who believes that the earth is sacred, and that women and women's bodies are one expression of that sacred being. My spirituality has always been linked to my feminism. Feminism is about challenging unequal power structures. So, it also means challenging inequalities in race, class, sexual preference. What we need to be doing is not just changing who holds power, but changing the way we conceive of power. There is the power we're all familiar with — power over. But there is another kind of power — power from within. For a woman, it is the power to be fertile either in terms of having babies or writing books or dancing or baking bread or being a great organizer. It is the kind of power that doesn't depend on depriving someone else.

Source: Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book VI, Lines 851–853 (tr. Robert Fitzgerald)

Confessions Of A Sceptic
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: Once in our lives we have all to choose. More or less we have all felt once the same emotions. We have not always been what the professions make of us. Nature made us men, and she surrenders not her children without a struggle. I will go back to my story now with but this one word, that it is these sons of genius, and the fate they meet with, which is to me the one sole evidence that there is more in "this huge state" than what is seen, and that in very truth the soul of man is not a thing which comes and goes, is builded and decays like the elemental frame in which it is set to dwell, but a very living force, a very energy of God's organic Will, which rules and moulds this universe.
For what are they? Say not, say not, it is but a choice which they have made; and an immortality of glory in heaven shall reward them for what they have sacrificed on earth. It may be so; but they do not ask for it. They are what they are from the Divine power which is in them, and you would never hear their complainings if the grave was the gate of annihilation.

Transhumanism (1957)
Context: The new understanding of the universe has come about through the new knowledge amassed in the last hundred years — by psychologists, biologists, and other scientists, by archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians. It has defined man's responsibility and destiny — to be an agent for the rest of the world in the job of realizing its inherent potentialities as fully as possible.
It is as if man had been suddenly appointed managing director of the biggest business of all, the business of evolution — appointed without being asked if he wanted it, and without proper warning and preparation. What is more, he can't refuse the job. Whether he wants to or not, whether he is conscious of what he is doing or not, he is in point of fact determining the future direction of evolution on this earth. That is his inescapable destiny, and the sooner he realizes it and starts believing in it, the better for all concerned.

World Within World (1951)
Context: I am for neither West nor East, but for myself considered as a self — one of the millions who inhabit the earth... If it seems absurd that an individual should set up as a judge between these vast powers, armed with their superhuman instruments of destruction I can reply that the very immensity of the means to destroy proves that judging and being judged does not lie in these forces. For supposing that they achieved their utmost and destroyed our civilization, whoever survived would judge them by a few statements. a few poems, a few témoignages [testimonies] surviving from all the ruins, a few words of those men who saw outside and beyond the means which were used and all the arguments which were marshaled in the service of those means.
Thus I could not escape from myself into some social situation of which my existence was a mere product, and my witnessing a willfully distorting instrument. I had to be myself, choose and not be chosen... But to believe that my individual freedom could gain strength from my seeking to identify myself with the "progressive" forces was different from believing that my life must be an instrument of means decided on by political leaders. I came to see that within the struggle for a juster world, there is a further struggle between the individual who cares for long-term values and those who are willing to use any and every means to gain immediate political ends — even good ends. Within even a good social cause, there is a duty to fight for the pre-eminence of individual conscience. The public is necessary, but the private must not be abolished by it; and the individual must not be swallowed up by the concept of the social man.

Ch 28 : The Shallowest Sort of Mysticism
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
Context: I quite fixedly believe the Wardens of Earth sometimes unbar strange windows, that face on other worlds than ours. And some of us, I think, once in a while get a peep through these windows. But we are not permitted to get a long peep, or an unobstructed peep, nor very certainly, are we permitted to see all there is — out yonder. The fatal fault, sir, of your theorizing is that it is too complete. It aims to throw light upon the universe, and therefore is self-evidently moonshine. The Wardens of Earth do not desire that we should understand the universe, Mr. Kennaston; it is part of Their appointed task to insure that we never do; and because of Their efficiency every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong.

Upon the Sovereign Sun (362)
Context: The good effects that emanate from the same source are equally diffused upon the earth. Different regions become partakers in these benefits in different ways; so that neither their production comes to an end, nor does the Deity confer his blessings upon the recipient world with any degree of variation. For where the substance is the same, so is the action thereof, in the case of Divine Powers; especially with him who is king of them all, namely, the Sun; of whom the motion is the most simple amongst all the bodies that move in a contrary direction to the world, which fact that most excellent philosopher, Aristotle, adduces to prove the superiority of that luminary to the others.

"The First Morning", p. 1
Desert Solitaire (1968)
Context: This is the most beautiful place on earth.
There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio, or Rome — there's no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment.

Source: Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book VI, Line 663 (tr. William Morris); the blessed in Elysium. A paraphrase of this is inscribed on the Nobel prize medals for Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, and Literature: Inventas vitam juvat excoluisse per artes ("inventions enhance life which is beautified through art").

1840s, The Conservative (1841)
Context: It will never make any difference to a hero what the laws are. His greatness will shine and accomplish itself unto the end, whether they second him or not. If he have earned his bread by drudgery, and in the narrow and crooked ways which were all an evil law had left him, he will make it at least honorable by his expenditure. Of the past he will take no heed; for its wrongs he will not hold himself responsible: he will say, All the meanness of my progenitors shall not bereave me of the power to make this hour and company fair and fortunate. Whatsoever streams of power and commodity flow to me, shall of me acquire healing virtue, and become fountains of safety. Cannot I too descend a Redeemer into nature? Whosoever hereafter shall name my name, shall not record a malefactor, but a benefactor in the earth. If there be power in good intention, in fidelity, and in toil, the north wind shall be purer, the stars in heaven shall glow with a kindlier beam, that I have lived. I am primarily engaged to myself to be a public servant of all the gods, to demonstrate to all men that there is intelligence and good will at the heart of things, and ever higher and yet higher leadings. These are my engagements; how can your law further or hinder me in what I shall do to men? On the other hand, these dispositions establish their relations to me. Wherever there is worth, I shall be greeted. Wherever there are men, are the objects of my study and love. Sooner of later all men will be my friends, and will testify in all methods the energy of their regard. I cannot thank your law for my protection. I protect it. It is not in its power to protect me. It is my business to make myself revered. I depend on my honor, my labor, and my dispositions for my place in the affections of mankind, and not on any conventions or parchments of yours.

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)
Context: It was the warrior within
Who called 'Awake, prepare for fight:
Yet lose not memory in the din:
Make of thy gentleness thy might:
'Make of thy silence words to shake
The long-enthroned kings of earth:
Make of thy will the force to break
Their towers of wantonness and mirth.

Property (1935)
Context: When we pray, "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth," we are praying for the abolition of individualism and the coming of the higher individuality through collective action as members of God's Home on earth. "If the Son shall make you free, you will be free indeed.... For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, and whoever, for My sake and for the sake of the Good News, will lose his life shall save it." "Make me a captive, Lord, then shall I be free!" Truly, freedom can be preserved only by throwing it away! And individuality can reach its highest level only through the collectivism of the beloved community!

A Hero of Our Time (1840; rev. 1841)

A Poet's Advice (1958)
Context: my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does this sound dismal? It isn't.
It's the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Context: the defendant had the right to say every word with which he is charged in this indictment. He had the right to give his honest thought, no matter whether any human being agreed with what he said or not, and no matter whether any other man approved of the manner in which he said these things. I defend his right to speak, whether I believe in what he spoke or not, or in the propriety of saying what he did. I should defend a man just as cheerfully who had spoken against my doctrine, as one who had spoken against the popular superstitions of my time. It would make no difference to me how unjust the attack was upon my belief -- how maliciously ingenious; and no matter how sacred the conviction that was attacked, I would defend the freedom of speech. And why? Because no attack can be answered by force, no argument can be refuted by a blow, or by imprisonment, or by fine. You may imprison the man, but the argument is free; you may fell the man to the earth, but the statement stands.

Commencement address at Lindsey Wilson College (14 May 2005) http://www.lindsey.edu/index.cgi?id=10379.
Context: The line that connects the bombing of civilian populations to the mountain removed by strip mining … to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight. We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare — warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.

The Legend of Jubal (1869)
Context: Wouldst thou have asked aught else from any god
Whether with gleaming feet on earth he trod
Or thundered through the skies — aught else for share
Of mortal good, than in thy soul to bear
The growth of song, and feel the sweet unrest
Of the world's spring-tide in thy conscious breast?
No, thou hadst grasped thy lot with all its pain,
Nor loosed it any painless lot to gain
Where music's voice was silent; for thy fate
Was human music's self incorporate:
Thy senses' keenness and thy passionate strife
Were flesh of her flesh and her womb of Life.

"A Summer Night"
By Still Waters (1906)
Context: Silence and coolness now the earth enfold:
Jewels of glittering green, long mists of gold,
Hazes of nebulous silver veil the height,
And shake in tremors through the shadowy night.
Heard through the stillness, as in whispered words,
The wandering God-guided wings of birds
Ruffle the dark. The little lives that lie
Deep hid in grass join in a long-drawn sigh
More softly still; and unheard through the blue
The falling of innumerable dew,
Lifts with grey fingers all the leaves that lay
Burned in the heat of the consuming day.

Pg 48
Against Method (1975)
Context: Progress was often achieved by a "criticism from the past"… After Aristotle and Ptolemy, the idea that the earth moves - that strange, ancient, and "entirely ridiculous", Pythagorean view was thrown on the rubbish heap of history, only to be revived by Copernicus and to be forged by him into a weapon for the defeat of its defeaters. The Hermetic writings played an important part in this revival, which is still not sufficiently understood, and they were studied with care by the great Newton himself. Such developments are not surprising. No idea is ever examined in all its ramifications and no view is ever given all the chances it deserves. Theories are abandoned and superseded by more fashionable accounts long before they have had an opportunity to show their virtues. Besides, ancient doctrines and "primitive" myths appear strange and nonsensical only because their scientific content is either not known, or is distorted by philologists or anthropologists unfamiliar with the simplest physical, medical or astronomical knowledge.

Press Statement issued the day before her marriage to Aristotle Onassis, NY Times (20 October 1968)
Context: We know you understand that even though people may be well known they still hold in their hearts the emotions of a simple person for the moments that are the most important of those we know on earth — birth, marriage, death. We wish our wedding to be a private moment in the little chapel among the cypresses of Skorpios.

The Key to the Universe (1977)
Context: In a sense, human flesh is made of stardust.
Every atom in the human body, excluding only the primordial hydrogen atoms, was fashioned in stars that formed, grew old and exploded most violently before the Sun and the Earth came into being. The explosions scattered the heavy elements as a fine dust through space. By the time it made the Sun, the primordial gas of the Milky Way was sufficiently enriched with heavier elements for rocky planets like the Earth to form. And from the rocks atoms escaped for eventual incorporation in living things: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur for all living tissue; calcium for bones and teeth; sodium and potassium for the workings of nerves and brains; the iron colouring blood red… and so on.
No other conclusion of modern research testifies more clearly to mankind’s intimate connections with the universe at large and with the cosmic forces at work among the stars.

Sestina of the Space Rocket (1953)
Context: Eyes forward! Sing a paean to the light
That God gives us to net the distant stars
In eyes that once were blinded with black earth.
Man had no time for aught but toll, no space
For aught but war. Yet God, in His great love,
Has cleared our eyes and given a hint of Power.

Inhale and Exhale (1936), Antranik and the Spirit of Armenia
Context: It's all over. We can begin to forget Armenia now. Andranik is dead. The nation is lost. I'm no Armenian. I'm an American. Well, the truth is I am both and neither. I love Armenia and I love America and I belong to both, but I am only this: an inhabitant of the earth, and so are you, whoever you are. I tried to forget Armenia but I couldn't do it.

Black Boy (1945)

Activity, l. 1-6.
Ballads for the Times (1851)
Context: Open the casement, and up with the Sun!
His gallant journey is just begun;
Over the hills his chariot is roll'd,
Banner'd with glory, and burnish'd with gold,—
Over the hills he comes sublime,
Bridegroom of Earth, and brother of Time!

Vol. 2 "The Art of Literature" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims
Context: Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. A meteor makes a striking effect for a moment. You look up and cry “There!” and it is gone forever. Planets and wandering stars last a much longer time. They often outshine the fixed stars and are confounded by them by the inexperienced; but this only because they are near. It is not long before they must yield their place; nay, the light they give is reflected only, and the sphere of their influence is confined to their orbit — their contemporaries. Their path is one of change and movement, and with the circuit of a few years their tale is told. Fixed stars are the only ones that are constant; their position in the firmament is secure; they shine with a light of their own; their effect today is the same as it was yesterday, because, having no parallax, their appearance does not alter with a difference in our standpoint. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth.

Khalil in Spirits Rebellious (1908) "Khalil The Heretic" Part 3
Context: Vain are the beliefs and teachings that make man miserable, and false is the goodness that leads him into sorrow and despair, for it is man's purpose to be happy on this earth and lead the way to felicity and preach its gospel wherever he goes. He who does not see the kingdom of heaven in this life will never see it in the coming life. We came not into this life by exile, but we came as innocent creatures of God, to learn how to worship the holy and eternal spirit and seek the hidden secrets within ourselves from the beauty of life. This is the truth which I have learned from the teachings of the Nazarene.

A Prescription for Hope (1985)

All the Trouble in the World (1994)

Theodric : A Domestic Tale; and Other Poems (1825), To the Rainbow
Context: p>Methinks, thy jubilee to keep,
The first-made anthem rang
On earth deliver'd from the deep,
And the first poet sang.Nor ever shall the Muse's eye
Unraptured greet thy beam:
Theme of primeval prophecy,
Be still the poet's theme!</p

The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: It is not you talking, but innumerable ancestors talking with your mouth. It is not you who desire, but innumerable generations of descendants longing with your heart.
Your dead do not lie in the ground. They have become birds, trees, air. You sit under their shade, you are nourished by their flesh, you inhale their breathing. They have become ideas and passions, they determine your will and your actions.
Future generations do not move far from you in an uncertain time. They live, desire, and act in your loins and your heart.
In this lightning moment when you walk the earth, your first duty, by enlarging your ego, is to live through the endless march, both visible and invisible, of your own being.

<!-- http://www.vialibri.net/552display_i/year_1820_600_491675.html DEAD LINK as of 2014·09·06 --> Letter to William James MacNeven (1820); quoted in "The Red Harlot of Liberty: The Rise and Fall of Frances Wright" by Kimberly Nichols in Newtopia Magazine (15 May 2013) http://newtopiamagazine.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/the-red-harlot-of-liberty-the-rise-and-fall-of-frances-wright/
Context: Another revolution! Naples free and all of Italy in insurrection! How wonderful has been the march of the human mind in these last thirty years … so may it be till the last link of the chains of slavery is broken and the banner of freedom waves over the whole earth!

Inaugural Address of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, London (1851).
Context: Nobody who has paid any attention to the peculiar features of our present era will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of most wonderful transition which tends rapidly to the accomplishment that great end to which, indeed, all history points—the realization of the unity of mankind.... The distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern invention, and we can traverse them with incredible ease; the languages of all nations are known, and their acquirement placed within the reach of everybody; thought is communicated with the rapidity and even by the power of lightning... The knowledge acquired becomes at once the property of all of the community at large... no sooner is a discovery or invention made, than it is already improved upon and surpassed by competing efforts: the products of all quarters of the globe are placed at our disposal, and we have only to choose which is the best and the cheapest for our purposes, and the powers of production are entrusted to the stimulus of competition and capital.... Science discovers these laws of power, motion and transformation; industry applies them to raw matter which the earth yields us in abundance, but which becomes valuable only by knowledge.

The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)
Context: Haply the Law that rules the world allows to man the widest range;
And haply Fate's a Theist-word, subject to human chance and change.
This "I" may find a future Life, a nobler copy of our own,
Where every riddle shall be ree'd, where every knowledge shall be known;
Where 'twill be man's to see the whole of what on Earth he sees in part;
Where change shall ne'er surcharge the thought; nor hope defer'd shall hurt the heart.

A Tree Telling of Orpheus (1968)
Context: And I
in terror
but not in doubt of
what I must do
in anguish, in haste,
wrenched from the earth root after root,
the soil heaving and cracking, the moss tearing asunder —
and behind me the others: my brothers
forgotten since dawn. In the forest
they too had heard,
and were pulling their roots in pain
out of a thousand years' layers of dead leaves,
rolling the rocks away,
breaking themselves
out of
their depths.

Letter to Richard Cobden (8 January 1862), quoted in Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston (London: Constable, 1970), p. 590.
1860s
Context: It would be very delightful if your Utopia could be realized and if the nations of the earth would think of nothing but peace and commerce, and would give up quarrelling and fighting altogether. But unfortunately man is a fighting and quarrelling animal; and that this is human nature is proved by the fact that republics, where the masses govern are far more quarrelsome, and more addicted to fighting, than monarchies, which are governed by comparatively few persons.

Source: Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche (1994), The Self, p. 324 - 325