When the loud day for men who sow and reap Grows still, and on the silence of the town The insubstantial veils of night and sleep, The meed of the day's labour, settle down, Then for me in the stillness of the night The wasting, watchful hours drag on their course, And in the idle darkness comes the bite Of all the burning serpents of remorse; Dreams seethe; and fretful infelicities Are swarming in my over-burdened soul, And Memory before my wakeful eyes With noiseless hand unwinds her lengthy scroll. Then, as with loathing I peruse the years, I tremble, and I curse my natal day, Wail bitterly, and bitterly shed tears, But cannot wash the woeful script away.
Aleksandr PushkinRelated topics
bite burning comes course curse darkness day drag hours idle men loud memory natal night peruse reap script scroll settle shed silence sleep soul sow stillness swarming town wash wasting tears years labour eyesRelated quotes
Many nights I stood on the bridge - and in the middle alone - lost - a defenseless prey to the surrounding swarming darkness - crushed by the mountainous black impenetrability of the skyscrapers - here and there lights resembling suspended falls of astral bodies or fantastic splendors of remote rites - shaken by the underground tumult of the trains in perpetual motion, like blood in the arteries-at times, ringing as alarm in a tempest, the shrill sulphurous voice of the trolley wires - now and then strange moanings of appeal from tugboats, guessed more than seen, through the infernal recesses below - I felt deeply moved, as if on the threshold of a new religion or in the presence of a new DIVINITY.
Joseph Stella
Religion has its place, certainly, in reinforcing ethical behavior amongst the masses, but any sufficiently enlightened secular laws will have the same effect. After all, most of the creeds of the world have essentially the same purpose, have they not? To enjoin men to be what we call moral, which is to say civilized. A civilized man obey the rule of law, he acknowledges that he must not injure his neighbors, and if injured by them, he must appeal to law for satisfaction rather than indulge in burning their houses over their heads as they sleep. Civilization is the ideal for which we strive, with so little perceptible success; yet we do succeed, in inches and over years.
Kage Baker
We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own, intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.
Abraham Lincoln
Do everything simply and meekly. Do nothing with an ulterior motive. Don't say, I'll do this in order to have that result, but do it naturally, without taking cognizance of it. That is, pray simply and don't think about what God will bestow on your soul. Don't make any calculations. You know, of course, what God bestows when you enter into communion with Him, but it is as if you don't know. Don't discuss the matter even with yourself. So when you repeat the prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me”, say it simply and ingenuously and think of nothing other than the prayer. These are very delicate matters and the intervention of the grace of God is required.
Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia
I have a saying. 'Never judge a book by its cover'. I say that because I don't even know who Ozzy is. I wake up a new person every day. But if you've got a fantasy of Ozzy, who am I to say? I mean, if you think I sleep upside-down in the rafters and fly around at night and bite people's throats out, then that's your thing. But I can tell you now, all I ever wanted was for people to come to my concerts and have a good time. I don't want anyone to harm themselves in any way, shape or form-and my intentions are good whether people want to believe it or not. I'm not going to suddenly become a Jesus freak or anything. But I do have my beliefs and my beliefs are certainly not satanic.
Ozzy Osbourne