Belief Beyond Reason-Malcom Muggeridge

"A sense of how extraordinarily happy I have been., and of enormous gratitude to my creator,overwhelms me often. I believe with a passionate , unshakeable conviction that in all circumstances and at all times life is a blessed gift; that the spirit that animates it is one of love, not hate or indifference, of light, not darkness, of creativity ,not destruction of order, not chaos. Since all life-men, women, creatures, plants, as well as insentate matter- and all that is known about, is, has been benelovently , not malevolently, conceived; when the eyes no more see and the mind thinks no more, and this hand now writing is inert, I believe that whatever lies beyond will similarly be benelovently, not malevolently or indifferently conceived. If it is nothing, then it is nothingness I offer thanks; if it's another mode of existence with this worn out husk of a body left behind, like a butterfly extricating itself from a chrysalis; and this floundering , muddled mind, now at best seeing through a glass darkly, given longer range and new precision, then for that likewise I offer thanks."

From "anyone lived in a pretty how-town" - e.e. cummings

women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

From The Gettysburg Address - Abraham Lincoln

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.


But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The Meditation of the Old Fisherman - W. B. Yeats

"You waves, though you dance by my feet like children at play,
Though you glow and you glance, though you purr and you dart;
In the Junes that were warmer than these are, the waves were more gay,
When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart."

We Shall Find Peace - Anton Chekhov

"We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds."

From Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan

I fell in loe with my brother-in-law the way you fall asleepin the car when someone you trust is driving--gradually, by imperceptible degrees, letting the motion lull your eyes closed. Letting, that's the keyword.

Look to the Day - Sanskrit

Yesterday is already a dream, tomorrow is only a vision, but today ,well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, every tomorrow a vision of hope.

- Contributed by Don Warner

So Small A Thing - Matthew Arnold

It is so small a thing
to have enjoyed the sun
to have lived with the light
to have loved, to have felt and thought,
to have done.

- Contributed by Don Warner

Time is the Mercy of Eternity- Kenneth Rexroth

The long sunlight is golden
On the deep green grass and bright
Red flowers of the meadow.
I stop where I meander,
The brook forms a deep pool.
The water is greenish brown
But perfectly transparent
A small dense cloud of hundreds
Of midges, no bigger than my head,
hovers over it,
On the bank two small frogs.
In the water are beetles
Hydras, waterbugs, larvae
of several insects
It is like peering into an inkspot
and finding yourself staring
Out into the Milky Way
The deep vibration of my identity
With all this plentitude of life
Leaves me shaken and giddy.
I step softly across the meadow.

Little Gidding- by T.S.Eliot

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown , remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning,
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall.

The Sea- By Donald Hall

The drunken waves argue
the same sentences
over and over, as if
no one will understand them.

Splendour in the Grass -William Wordsworth

What though the radiance
which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass,
of glory in the flower,
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

From: "A Few Figs from Thistles" -Edna St. Vincent Millay

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends
It gives a lovely light.


1920US poet (1892 - 1950)

From: A Ship Made of Paper

“The sky is dark blue and the autumn sun is warm and steady, as if promising that winter will never arrive. A slow breeze moves down the street, carrying the perfume of the slowly dying leaves, a nearby field’s last mowing, the river. What can the world do to you with its beauty? Can it lift you up on its shoulders, as if you were a hero, can it whoopsie-daisy you up in to its arms as if you were a child? Can it goad your timid heart, urge you on to finally seize what you most shamefully desire? Yes, yes, all that and more. The world can crush you with its beauty.”

- A Ship Made of Paper by Scott Spencer

Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
W.B.Yeats

From "Spoon River Anthology" - E.L. Masters

Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith,
The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one?--
All, all are sleeping on the hill.

One died in shameful child-birth,
One of a thwarted love,
One at the hands of a brute in a brothel,
One of a broken pride, in the search for heart's desire;
One after life in far-away London and Paris
Was brought to her little space by Ella and Kate and Mag--
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.

Where are Uncle Isaac and Aunt Emily,
And old Towny Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton,
And Major Walker who had talked With venerable men of the revolution?--
All, all are sleeping on the hill.

Edgar Lee Masters

From "Among School Children" - W.B.Yeats

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

W.B.Yeats

From The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made….

From A Speech by TR

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

Theodore Roosevelt

How can I... - W.B.Yeats

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here’s a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!

W.B. Yeats

From The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - T.S.Eliot

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"

Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

T. S. Eliot

St. Crispin's Day - William Shakespeare

This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

William Shakespeare, Henry V

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

The NELLIE, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits.

Joseph Conrad

The Soul of a Man - Edgar Lee Masters

How shall the soul of a man be larger than the life he has lived?

Edgar Lee Masters

The Grandeur of God - Gerard Manley Hopkins

"The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil."

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Wild Nights - Emily Dickinson

Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port,
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!

Emily Dickinson

A Pleasant Cafe - Ernest Hemingway

It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old water-proof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write.
--Ernest Hemingway

Paris - Ernest Hemingway

There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this was how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy. – Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast