The Grey Beyond

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”

There is not enough time to do all the nothing we want to do.

Never forget that life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if you take it bravely and gallantly, as a splendid adventure in which you are setting out into an unknown country, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle.

“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.”

We are ignorant of the Beyond because this ignorance is the condition of our own life. Just as ice cannot know fire except by melting and vanishing.

In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.

I would be glad to know which is worst, to be ravished a hundred times by pirates, to have one buttock cut off, to run the gauntlet among the Bulgarians, to be whipped and hanged at an auto-da-fe, to be dissected, to be chained to an oar in a galley; and, in short, to experience all the miseries through which every one of us hath passed, or to remain here doing nothing?’
‘This,’ said Candide, ‘is the grand question’.

“One has to chose ever so delicately among one’s difficulties, attaching oneself to the greatest, bearing hard on those and intelligently neglecting the others. If one attempts to tackle them all one is certain to deal completely with none; whereas the effectual dealing with a few casts a blest golden haze under cover of which, like wanton mocking goddesses in clouds, the others find prudent to retire.”

Being nobody’s son, I was my own course and was filled with both pride and wretchedness…I have always preferred to accuse myself rather than the universe, not only out of simple good-heartedness, but in order to derive only from myself.

“The alleged deviant is often just a man with a deeper than average apprehension of normality.”

Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the street: very peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see…hold on to the now, the here through which all future plunges.

You know, there are very few places in the world where I am at home. Isn’t that pathetic? And there are actually fewer of them every day, too. And they’re shrinking. Does this happen to you? There is going to come a time when there will only be a very small space. And that’s all I’ll have. I’ll have to remain very still and look only in one direction, but then I’ll be okay, actually.

I’ve got my feet on the ground and I don’t go to sleep to dream.