Life and Existence

Every passing hour brings the Solar Systemforty-three thousand miles closer to GlobularCluster M13 in Hercules—and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.

I was the victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

In this world we run the risk of having tochoose between being either the anvil or thehammer.

If there were only one religion in England, there would be danger of tyranny; if there weretwo, they would cut each other’s throats; butthere are thirty, and they live happily togetherin peace.

Death twitches my ear. “Live,” he says; “I am coming.”

Death twitches my ear. “Live,” he says; “I am coming.”

Audacibus annue coeptis .

Geniumque loci primamque deorum

Manibus date lilia plenis .

L’avenir est comme le reste: il n’est plus ce qu’il était .

L’avenir est comme le reste: il n’est plus ce qu’il était .

Nous autres, civilisations, nous savons maintenant que nous sommes mortelles .

[ On Ted Williams’s last baseball game at FenwayPark, Boston, Mass. :] Our noise for someseconds passed beyond excitement into akind of immense open anguish, a cry to besaved. But immortality is nontransferable. Thepapers said that the other players, and eventhe umpires on the field, begged him to comeout and acknowledge us in some way, but henever had and did not now. Gods do not answerletters.

Life is doubt,

Life is doubt,

[Christian nations are the most enlightenedand progressive] in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in child-birth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

God made man, without man’s consent, andmade his nature, too; made it vicious instead of angelic, and then said, Be angelic, or I will punish you and destroy you. But no matter, God is responsible for everything man does, all the same; He can’t get around that fact.There is only one Criminal, and it is not man.

[ On the Bible :] It is full of interest. It hasnoble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.

There is no God, no universe, no humanrace, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought —a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlornamong the empty eternities!

There is no God, no universe, no humanrace, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought —a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlornamong the empty eternities!

Let me make the superstitions of a nationand I care not who makes its laws or its songs either.

He saw nearly all things as through a glass eye, darkly.

Even popularity can be overdone. In Rome, along at first, you are full of regrets that Michelangelo died; but by and by you only regret that you didn’t see him do it.