Quotes, Poems And Other Writings Are The Business.

“A man, though wise, should never be ashamed of learning more, and must unbend his mind.” Sophocles, Antigone

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Men of the Shadows

By Robert E Howard

From the dim red dawn of Creation From the fogs of timeless Time Came we, the first great nation, First on the upward climb.

Savage, untaught, unknowing, Groping through primitive night, Yet faintly catching the glowing, The hint of the coming Light.

Ranging o’er lands untraveled, Sailing o’er seas unknown Mazed by world-puzzles unraveled, Building our land-marks of stone.

Vaguely grasping at glory, Gazing beyond our ken Mutely the ages’ story Rearing on plain and fen.

See, how the Lost Fire smolders, We are one with the eons’ must. Nations have trod our shoulders, Trampling us into the dust.

We, the first of the races, Linking the Old and New – Look, where the sea-cloud spaces Mingle with ocean-blue.

So we have mingled with ages, And the world-wind our ashes stirs, Vanished are we from Time’s pages, Our memory? Wind in the firs.

Stonehenge of long-gone glory Sombre and lone in the night, Murmur the age-old story How we kindled the first of the Light.

Speak night-winds, of man’s creation, Whisper o’er crag and fen, The tale of the first great nation, The last of the Stone Age men.

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On Hans Christian Andersen

"When the English romantics wanted to find the folk-tale spirit still alive, they found it in the small country of one of those small kings, with whom the folk-tales are almost comically crowded. There they found what we call an original writer, who was nevertheless the image of the origins. They found a whole fairyland in one head and under one nineteenth-century top hat. Those of the English who were then children owe to Hans Andersen more than to any of their own writers, that essential educational emotion which feels that domesticity is not dull but rather fantastic; that sense of the fairyland of furniture, and the travel and adventure of the farmyard. His treatment of inanimate things as animate was not a cold and awkward allegory: it was a true sense of a dumb divinity in things that are. Through him a child did feel that the chair he sat on was something like a wooden horse. Through him children and the happier kind of men did feel themselves covered by a roof as by the folded wings of some vast domestic fowl; and feel common doors like great mouths that opened to utter welcome. In the story of "The Fir Tree" he transplanted to England a living bush that can still blossom into candles. And in his tale of "The Tin Soldier" he uttered the true defence of romantic militarism against the prigs who would forbid it even as a toy for the nursery. He suggested, in the true tradition of the folk-tales, that the dignity of the fighter is not in his largeness but rather in his smallness, in his stiff loyalty and heroic helplessness in the hands of larger and lower things."

~G.K. Chesterton: "The Crimes of England," Chap VI. — Hamlet and the Danes.

(Image: The Hanfstaengl portrait of Andersen, July 1860)

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“And when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. What do you call it, freedom or loneliness?”

Charles Bukowski

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“Mortal man, you have lived as a citizen in this great city. What matter if that life is five or fifty years? The laws of the city apply equally to all. So what is there to fear in your dismissal from the city? This is no tyrant or corrupt judge who dismisses you, but the very same nature that brought you in. It is like the officer who engaged a comic actor dismissing him from the stage. 'But I have not played my five acts, only three.' "True, but in life three acts can be the whole play.' Completion is determined by that being who caused first your composition and now your dissolution. You have no part in either causation. Go then in peace: the god who lets you go is at peace with you.”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

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“The only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.” ~Hegel

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“A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason.”

G K Chesterton

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“Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent — the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free.”

H.L. Mencken

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