Sunday, October 28, 2018 – Dark Days
Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness. ~ Werner Herzog
As nightfall does not come at once neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness. ~ William O. Douglas
To prejudge other men’s notions before we have looked into them is not to show their darkness but to put out our own eyes. ~ John Locke
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible. ~ John Updike
We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things, because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm. Yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine. ~ E .M. Forster, A Room with a View
Such is the influence which the condition of our own thoughts, exercises, even over the appearance of external objects. Men who look on nature, and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and gloomy, are in the right; but the somber colors are reflections from their own jaundiced eyes and hearts. The real hues are delicate, and need a clearer vision. ~ Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish form our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in times of despair. ~ Bertrand Russell
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness. ~ Jean Genet
All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness. ~ John Ruskin
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. ~ Carl Jung
To penetrate and dissipate these clouds of darkness, the general mind must be strengthened by education. ~ Thomas Jefferson
Purity engenders Wisdom, Passion avarice, and Ignorance folly, infatuation and darkness. ~ Cyril Connolly
Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere. ~ James Madison
I’m not interested in blind optimism, but I’m very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, “This is not enough.” ~ Colum McCann
But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep? ~ James Thurber
Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will. But we’ve drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, that we’ve got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing. ~ Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. ~ Vladimir Nabokov
The real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darkness. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis
From the world of darkness I did loose demons and devils in the power of scorpions to torment. ~ Charles Manson
Character is what you are in the dark. ~ Dwight L. Moody
I have always felt that laughter in the face of reality is probably the finest sound there is and will last until the day when the game is called on account of darkness. In this world, a good time to laugh is any time you can. ~ Linda Ellerbee
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me. ~ Anna Quindlen
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. ~ Richard Wright
In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time. ~ W. Somerset Maugham
I’m not afraid of the darkness outside. It’s the darkness inside houses I don’t like. ~ Shelagh Delaney
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people. ~ Carl Jung
Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. ~ Terry Pratchett
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness. ~ Aldous Huxley
Love and memory last and will so endure till the game is called because of darkness. ~ Gene Fowler
Love is the only game that is not called on account of darkness. ~ Thomas Carlyle
Man dies of cold, not of darkness. ~ Miguel de Unamuno
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us. ~ Marianne Williamson
All of us are born with a set of instinctive fears – of falling, of the dark, of lobsters, of falling on lobsters in the dark, or speaking before a Rotary Club, and of the words “Some Assembly Required.” ~ Dave Barry
Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness. ~ Terry Pratchett
There is no such thing as darkness; only a failure to see. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge
Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody. ~ Mark Twain
I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness. ~ Franz Kafka
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too was a gift. ~ Mary Oliver
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. ~ T. S. Eliot
You can’t study the darkness by flooding it with light. ~ Edward Abbey
There is a good principle which created order, light, and man, and an evil principle which created chaos, darkness, and woman. ~ Pythagoras
A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark. ~ Henry Louis Mencken
Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams. ~ Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
Light shines into the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. ~ John 1:5
A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word “darkness” on the walls of his cell. ~ C. S. Lewis
Weather forecast for tonight: dark. ~ George Carlin
Just Above Sunset 