Life and Existence

Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it all going to end?

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily.

I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can’t do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory—they’re all blood, you see.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Under the wide and starry sky

Give to me the life I love,

All I seek, the heaven above

Sing me a song of a lad that is gone, Say, could that lad be I?

I was the giant great and still

I have a little shadow that goes in and out

In winter I get up at night

Marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

Even if we take matrimony at its lowest, even if we regard it as no more than a sort of friendship recognised by the police.

Man is not truly one, but truly two.

Man is not truly one, but truly two.

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

The palm at the end of the mind,

Let be be finale of seem.

Finality is death. Perfection is finality.

Finality is death. Perfection is finality.

Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

‘What is the answer?’ No answer came. She laughed and said, ‘In that case what is the question?’

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.