By whichever road you come by,
With whatever you sought to find
At the four corners of a child’s bed stand Perseus and Roland, Sigurd and St. George. If you withdraw the guard of heroes you are not making him rational; you are only leaving him to fight the devils alone. For the devils, alas, we have always believed in. The hopeful element in the universe has in modern times continually been denied and reasserted; but the hopeless element has never for a moment been denied. …the one thing modern people really do believe in is damnation.
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
Often when you think you’re at the end of something, you’re at the beginning of something else. I’ve felt that many times. My hope for all of us is that “the miles we go before we sleep” will be filled with all the feelings that come from deep caring—delight, sadness, joy, wisdom—and that in all the endings of our life, we will be able to see the new beginnings.
— Fred Rogers
He raised the cup. No time for words now; time for deeds; and with one of her lightning movements Tink got between his lips and the draught, and drained it to the dregs.
‘Why, Tink, how dare you drink my medicine?’
But she did not answer. Already she was reeling in the air.
‘What is the matter with you?’ cried Peter, suddenly afraid.
‘It was poisoned, Peter,’ she told him softly; ‘and now I am going to be dead.’
‘O Tink, did you drink it to save me?’
‘Yes.’
‘But why, Tink?’
Her wings would scarcely carry her now, but in reply she alighted on his shoulder and gave his chin a loving bite. She whispered in his ear ‘You silly ass’; and then, tottering to her chamber, lay down on the bed.
— J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan,xiii
some of you will think that I am an executioner and the more monstrous because I am cool about it; and some of you will not think at all. This difference in philosophy iss what makes life interesting.”
While the assistant tagged the pig with a tin disk in its ear and restored it to the battery jar, Gottlieb set down its weight in a notebook, with the time of inoculation and the age of the bacterial culture. These notes he reproduced on the blackboard, in his fastidious script, murmuring, “Gentlemen, the most important part of living is not the living but pondering upon it. And the most important part of experimentation is not doing the experiment but making notes, ve‑ry accurate quantitative notes—in ink. I am told that a great many clever people feel they can keep notes in their heads. I have often observed with pleasure that such persons do not have heads in which to keep their notes. This iss very good, because thus the world never sees their results and science is not encumbered with them. I shall now inoculate the second guinea pig, and the class will be dismissed. Before the next lab hour I shall be glad if you will read Pater’s ‘Marius the Epicurean’, to derife from it the calmness which iss the secret of laboratory skill.”
As they bustled down the hall, Angus Duer observed to a brother Digam, “Gottlieb is an old laboratory plug; he hasn’t got any imagination; he sticks here instead of getting out into the world and enjoying the fight. But he certainly is handy. Awfully good technique. He might have been a first-rate surgeon, and made fifty thousand dollars a year. As it is, I don’t suppose he gets a cent over four thousand!”
— Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith
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Tom Drifter | Explorer of the outer reaches of the transcendental realm. All the way outta Endsville to sing for you tonight. In the name of universal law and some powerful theories. Hope you like it, twin.