Is mankind alone in the universe? Or are there somewhere other intelligent beings looking up into their night sky from very different worlds and asking the same kind of question?
I've been a musician since I was nine. I think a ghost or goblin visited me in the night. Maybe aliens abducted me, or a divine figure sent me a spiritual memo. Who knows.
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!
Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber, Past the wan-mooned abysses of night, I have lived o'er my lives without number, I have sounded all things with my sight.
In the deepest night of trouble and sorrow God gives us so much to be thankful for that we need never cease our singing. With all our wisdom and foresight we can take a lesson in gladness and gratitude from the happy bird that sings all night, as if the day were not long enough to tell its joy.
To die, is to be banish'd from myself; And Silvia is myself: banish'd from her, Is self from self: a deadly banishment! What light is light, if Silvia be not seen? What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by? Unless it be to think that she is by, And feed upon the shadow of perfection. Except I be by Silvia in the night, There is no music in the nightingale; Unless I look on Silvia in the day, There is no day for me to look upon; She is my essence, and I leave to be, If I be not by her fair influence Foster'd, illumin'd, cherish'd, kept alive.
The rich are like beasts of burden, carrying treasure all day, and at the night of death unladen; they carry to their grave only the bruises and marks of their toil.
I thought that my invincible power would hold the world captive, leaving me in a freedom undisturbed. Thus night and day I worked at the chain with huge fires and cruel hard strokes. When at last the work was done and the links were complete and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip.
Let the new faces play what tricks they will
In the old rooms; night can outbalance day,
Our shadows rove the garden gravel still,
The living seem more shadowy than they.
A mob is a society obodies, voluntarily bereaving themselves oreason, and traversing its work. The mob is man, voluntarily descending to the nature othe beast. Its fit hour oactivity is night; its actions are insane, like its whole constitution.
Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spiraling round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core of nothingness, and yet not nothing.
I would that there was nothing in the world
But my beloved that night and day had perished,
And all that is and all that is to be,
All that is not the meeting of our lips.