But he was one of those weak creatures, void of pride, timorous, anemic, hateful souls, full of shifty cunning, who face neither God nor man, who face not even themselves.
There is no liberty, save wisdom and self-control. Liberty is within – not without. It is each man’s own affair.
There is no way out or round or through.
Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau –.
I fell indeed into a morbid state, deep and enduring, and alien to fear, which has left permanent scars upon my mind. I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it suffering the painful disorder of this island. A.
The stranger swore briefly but vividly.
The red tongues that went licking up my heap of wood were an altogether new and strange thing to Weena.
The sea was silent, the sky was silent; I was alone with the night and silence.
It is good to stop by the track for a space, put aside the knapsack, wipe the brows, and talk a little of the upper slopes of the mountain we think we are climbing, would but the trees let us see it.
As night goes round the Earth always there are hundreds of thousands of people who should be sleeping, lying awake, fearing a bully, fearing a cruel competition, dreading lest they cannot make good, ill of some illness they cannot comprehend, distressed by some irrational quarrel, maddened by some thwarted instinct or some suppressed perverted desire.
The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And.
Ambition – what is the good of pride of place when you cannot appear there? What is the good of the love of woman when her name must needs be Delilah?
I did not feel a bit sorry for my father. He seemed to me to be the victim of his own foolish sentimentality.
The most evil institution in the world is the Roman Catholic Church.
And the great difference between man and monkey is in the larynx, he said, in the incapacity to frame delicately different sounding symbols by which thought could be sustained.
What is your theologian’s ecstasy but Mahomet’s houri in the dark?
The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the most absorbing of occupations. The least satisfying of desires. A nameless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic and unreliable – but teach him, inoculate him with chess.
The fever of war that would presently clog vein and artery, deaden nerve, and destroy brain, had yet to develop.
I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes – to come to this at last.
You know that great pause that comes upon things before the dusk? Even the breeze stops in the trees. To me there is always an air of expectation about that evening stillness. The sky was clear, remote, and empty save for a few horizontal bars far down in the sunset. Well, that night the expectation took the colour of my fears.