i will show you fear in a handful of dust." t.s. eliot we don't actually fear death, we fear that no one will notice our absence, that we will disappear without a trace.
Genuine blasphemy, genuine in spirit and not purely verbal, is the product of partial belief, and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect Christian.
Art serves us best precisely at that point where it can shift our sense of what is possible, when we know more than we knew before, when we feel we have - by some manner of a leap - encountered the truth. That, by the logic of art, is always worth the pain.
If time and space, as sages say, Are things which cannot be, The sun which does not feel decay No greater is than we. So why, Love, should we ever pray To live a century? The butterfly that lives a day Has lived eternity.
Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.