— Luís de Camões Portuguese poet 1524 - 1580
(tr. David Wevill)
— Percy Bysshe Shelley English Romantic poet 1792 - 1822
St. XIX
— Dylan Thomas Welsh poet and writer 1914 - 1953
Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines, st. 1 (1934), st. 5
— Robert Hunter (author) American sociologist, author, golf course architect 1874 - 1942
Context: The greatest obstacle that confronted Tolstoy lies rooted deep in the soul of man. It is the fear of poverty and the dread of want which ages of struggle with man and beast and with all the adverse elements of nature has bred in us. Surely history teaches us too well the nature and character of man for us to believe readily that there are many fathers and mothers who would ever consent to become Christians on the conditions set forth by Tolstoy.... who to day would fail to condemn unreservedly any father who would take his babies from a comfortable home to live hungry and shelterless in the forests and fields. From the dawn of the world the chief duty of a parent has been to keep his family secure from want.
p. 60
— Algernon Charles Swinburne English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic 1837 - 1909
"Nephelidia", line 16, from The Heptalogia (1880); Swinburne intended "Nephelidia" as a self-parody.
— Albert Camus French author and journalist 1913 - 1960
Context: I don't know why, but something inside me snapped. I started yelling at the top of my lungs, and I insulted him and told him not to waste his prayers on me. I grabbed him by the collar of his cassock. I was pouring out on him everything that was in my heart, cries of anger and cries of joy.
He seemed so certain about everything, didn't he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman's head. He wasn't even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man. Whereas it looked as if I was the one who'd come up emptyhanded. But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on it as it had on me. I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn't done that. I hadn't done this thing but I had done another. And so? It was as if I had waited all this time for this moment and for the first light of this dawn to be vindicated. Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people's deaths or a mother's love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we're all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn't he see, couldn't he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too. <!-- translated by Matthew Ward
— Rabindranath Tagore Bengali polymath 1861 - 1941
— Anne McCaffrey American-Irish novelist 1926 - 2011
— George William Russell Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter 1867 - 1935
— Mike Oldfield English musician, multi-instrumentalist 1953
— Walt Whitman American poet, essayist and journalist 1819 - 1892
— Plutarch ancient Greek historian and philosopher 46 - 127
Life of Romulus
