Life and Existence

It is not best to swap horses when crossing streams.

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and heartstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?

Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death.

Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.

What will survive of us is love.

What are days for?

In the castle of my skin.

Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.

I have had playmates, I have had companions,

I have had playmates, I have had companions,

Ah! que la vie est quotidienne.

Death never takes the wise man by surprise; he is always ready to go.

The unbearable lightness of being.

The unbearable lightness of being.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

God and I both knew what it meant once; now God alone knows.

An active line on a walk, moving freely without a goal. A walk for walk’s sake.

They shut the road through the woods

For frantic boast and foolish word—

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased,

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—