Why should we fear that which will come to all that is? We cannot tell, we do not know, which is the greater blessing — life or death. We do not know whether the grave is the end of this life, or the door of another, or whether the night here is not somewhere else at dawn. Neither can we tell which is the more fortunate — the child dying in its mother’s arms, before its lips have learned to form a word, or he who journeys all the length of life’s uneven road, painfully taking the last slow steps with staff and crutch.
Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) American lawyer, agnostic, orator
“At a Child’s Grave” (8 Jan 1882)
(Source)
“NO WAR waged against the human spirit was ever won, and no effort waged to lift the human spirit was ever lost. Across the pages of history in bold letters underlined in innocent blood is written the futility of battle, while at the bottom of history’s pages in unheralded footnotes is the powerful and iridescent testimony of love.”
– SM NONA (in “The Brightness”)
“..Wherever people have been bound to slavery, other people have readily served to act as enforcers of that servitude, always in sufficient numbers and with sufficient ingenuity to make the recovery of freedom difficult, even bloody.
“The scarcity of a thing increases its value. When freedom is scarcest, people will die for what little is left.”
-SM NONA (from “THE BRIGHTNESS: Secrets of the Third Angel, and the Bridge at Kino Springs”) 2010.
“We are at our least, not when we are estranged from a metaphorical deity, but when we forget our humanity.”
SM NONA- (spoken by character, “BJ”), in “THE BRIGHTNESS: Secrets of the Third Angel, and the Bridge at Kino Springs”
“WE WERE the half-men who did not know that we could declare our humanity and be whole again, because we gave a part of it away to those who said, ‘You have the favor of the gods, and righteousness to pursue your enemies into victory!’
“The fields are strewn with the harvest now, and innocence laid waste by holy winds has left its shadow in stains of blood across the landscape of a gentle Earth. We were the violence that tears this world apart because we shaped it by habit into the image of our worship, and taught it to our children.
“In this future time, of power of one to affect and condemn another, we cannot continue to be half-human, divided against ourselves and against nature, the other half possessed by angry gods who manipulate their primeval territories in the mind. We must heal the damage they have done in their tenacious business and free the soul of the darkness that clings weightily against it, embracing at last, and joining the complete and infinite creation which holds our salvation in unity…”
-SM NONA, (from Fo’s Nobel speech) in THE BRIGHTNESS.
“‘I did this,’ says my memory.
‘I cannot have done this,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. In the end, memory yields.”
-Friedrich Nietzche
“It is humanity which is spiritual, which confers its spirituality upon the unanswerable questions we call the Divine.”
Kenneth David Teel, from “Moments of Existence: Poems and Notes of an American, 1970-1990.
“It is humanity which is spiritual, which confers its spirituality upon the unanswerable questions we call the Divine.”
Kenneth David Teel, from “Moments of Existence: Poems and Notes of an American, 1970-1990”.
“Then there is a time in life when you just take a walk: And you walk in your own landscape.”
Willem de Kooning (1904-1997)