Children of the Law,’ I said, ‘he is not dead.’ M’ling turned his sharp eyes on me. ‘He has changed his shape – he has changed his body,’ I went on. ‘For a time you will not see him. He is... there’ – I pointed upward – ’where he can watch you. You cannot see him. But he can see you. Fear the Law.
What a huge inaccessible lumber-room of thought and experience we amounted to, I thought; how much we are, how little we transmit.
In the night, he must have eaten and slept; for in the morning he was himself again, active, powerful, angry, and malignant, prepared for his last great struggle against the world.
There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.
Security sets a premium on feebleness.
Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother man out of the ease and the sunshine. And now that brother was coming back – changed!
But the Modern Utopia must not be static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage, leading to a long ascent of stages. Nowadays we do not resist and overcome the great stream of things, but rather float upon it. We build now not citadels, but ships of state.
Modern war, modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the conceit and intellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind.
There’s some ex-traordinary things in books,” said the mariner.
A certain elementary training in statistical method is becoming as necessary for everyone living in this world of today as reading and writing.
All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over.
The worst of all things that haunt poor mortal men,” said I; “and that is, in all its nakedness – ‘Fear!’ Fear that will not have light or sound, that will not bear with reason, that deafens and darkens and overwhelms.
The present writer is a prophet by use and wont. He is more interested in to-morrow than he is in to-day, and the past is just material for future guessing. “Think of the men who have walked here!” said a tourist in the Roman Coliseum. It was a Futurist mind that answered: “Think of the men who will.
Oh God, is there ever to be any age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?
Looks to me like the sort of fellow one doesn’t play cards with.
Love is not only the cardinal fact in the individual life, but the most important concern of the community; after all, the way in which the young people of this generation pair off determines the fate of the nation; all the other affairs of the state are subsidiary to that. And we leave it to flushed and blundering youth to stumble on its own significance, with nothing to guide it but shocked looks and sentimental twaddle and base whisperings and cant-smeared examples.
One may as well starve one’s body out of a place as to starve one’s soul in one.
He has made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.
For neither do men live nor die in vain. Here.
In our growing science of hypnotism we find the promise of a possibility of replacing old inherent instincts by new suggestions, grafting upon or replacing the inherited fixed ideas. Very much indeed of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct ; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion.