Droplets

• Misery has kings, and crowns of thorns, and armies beside which, in number and mass, the armies of conquerors are as nothing. And banners red and black.. and eyes whose lids are shut fast over dying dreams.. and cups that have never known wine.. and trees whose blood has dried.. and hearts through whose beats death flows.. and bodies whose frames are rattled by anxiety. And children whom darkness has adopted.. and young men in whom pain grew up and devoured their youth.. and girls wailing in the winds.. and a law traced by the hand of injustice.. and graves built before their day...

• Philosophers have palaces which people, in their silliness, have called huts..

• All that has been written of rapture and drawn of it is not rapture, and all that has been said of pain and carved for it is not pain; for art cannot give you, of what you feel and what quivers within you, a picture that matches the original, and the canvas, however splendid, remains poor and powerless.

• How can you hope to have your own mellow melody on the lyre of life if your soul is not itself melodious?

• Every day a leaf falls from the tree of your life, so that your remaining is one unbroken autumn.. You were not created for spring on this earth, though its spring comes to you every year.

• I stood upon the shore between life's flood and its ebb, and behold, I stood between reason and the heart.

• You must arrive at the assembly on high stained with the blood of the struggle between soul and body.

• Life has a book: a quarter of her children are in the lines, and the rest are in the margin.

• In every turning of this earth's turnings there is the drunkenness of an ancient drunkard, whose head has been turned by the aged wines these planets and suns and luminaries pour out for him..

• Sight is for the horizons; insight is for the depths..