There is no Gain in the world: so be it: but neither is there any Loss. There is never any failure to this infinite freshness of life, and the ancient novelty is forever renewed. We realize the world better if we imagine it, not as a Progress to Prim Perfection, but as the sustained upleaping of a Fountain, the pillar of a Glorious Flame. For, after all, we cannot go beyond the ancient image of Heraclitus, the Everliving Flame, kindled in due measure and in the like measure extinguished. That translucent and mysterious Flame shines undyingly before our eyes, never for two moments the same, and always miraculously incalculable, an everflowing stream of fire. The world is moving, men tell us, to this, to that, to the other. Do not believe them! Men have never known what the world is moving to. Who foresawto say nothing of older and vaster eventsthe Crucifixion? What Greek or Roman in his most fantastic moments prefigured our thirteenth century? What Christian foresaw the Renaissance? Who ever really expected the French Revolution? We cannot be too bold, for we are ever at the incipient point of some new manifestation far more overwhelming than all our dreams. No one can foresee the next aspect of the Fountain of Life. And all the time the Pillar of that Flame is burning at exactly the same height it has always been burning at! The World is everlasting Novelty, everlasting Monotony. It is just which aspect you prefer. You will always be right.
|
I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.
|
It seems to have had an order, to have been composed by someone, and those events that were merely accidental when they happened turn out to be the main elements in a consistent plot. Who composed this plot? Just as your dreams are composed, so your whole life has been composed by the will within you. Just as the people who you met by chance became effective agents in the structuring of your life, so you have been the agent in the structuring of other lives. And the whole thing gears together like one big symphony, everything influencing and structuring everything else. It's as though our lives were the dream of a single dreamer in which all of the dream characters are dreaming too. And so everything links to everything else moved out of the will in nature...It is as though there were an intention behind it yet it is all by chance. None of us lives the life that he had intended.
|
It is a brave act to despise death; but where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live.
|
A man must pay the fiddler, in my case it so happened that a whole symphony orchestra often had to be subsidized.
|
Come on, insisted Zaphod, I've found a way in. In? said Arthur in horror. Into the interior of the planet! An underground passage. The force of the whale's impact cracked it open, and that's where we have to go. Where no man has trod these five million years, into the very depths of time itself ... Marvin started his ironical humming again. Zaphod hit him and he shut up. With little shudders of disgust they all followed Zaphod down the incline into the crater, trying very hard not to look at its unfortunate creator. Life, said Marvin dolefully, loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it.
|
Life is a bed of water filling from many springs and we seem not to know when one gushing flow will oe'r flood the banks only to be succeeded by a drought. [letter to Edgar Cayce]
|
You have to take risks,' he said. 'We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.
|
Life's too short for chess.
|
I always wait for the Times each morning. I look at the obituary column and if I’m not in it, I go to work.
|
|
|
The goal is to live a full, productive life even with all that ambiguity. No matter what happens, whether the cancer never flares up again or whether you die, the important thing is that the days that you have had you will have lived.
|
Life is what we make it, and the world is what we make it. The eyes of the cheerful and of the melancholy man are fixed upon the same creation; but very different are the aspects which it bears to them.
|
Nay, do not grieve tho' life be full of sadness, Dawn will not veil her spleandor for your grief, Nor spring deny their bright, appointed beauty To lotus blossom and ashoka leaf. Nay, do not pine, tho' life be dark with trouble, Time will not pause or tarry on his way; Today that seems so long, so strange, so bitter, Will soon be some forgotten yesterday. Nay, do not weep; new hopes, new dreams, new faces, The unspent joy of all the unborn years, Will prove your heart a traitor to its sorrow, And make your eyes unfaithful to their tears.
|
I have been looking forward to this age of my life for a long time. In my twenties, I marked the days on the calendar - I was sick of playing high-school kids. I liked being a teenager, but I would not go back for all the tea in China. I think part of maturity is knowing who you are. If people don't like it, it is not going to affect how I feel.
|
Have regular hours for work and play; make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will be delightful, old age will bring few regrets, and life will become a beautiful success.
|
I'll go through life either first class or third, but never in second.
|
What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all.
|
A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.
|
A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?
|