Poeticly philosophical passages

I DO LIKE THIS PÄSSAGE TOO IN HEART OF DARKNESS.BUT I PREFER:"...One evening coming in with a candle i was startled to hear him say a little tremulously,'i am lying here in the dark waiting for death'.The light was within a foot of his eyes.I forced myself to murmur? 'oh,nonsense!' and stood over him as if transfixed.
'anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before,and hope nevert to see again.Oh,i wasn't touched.Iwas fascinated.It was as though a veil had been rent.I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride,of ruthless power,of craven terror-of an intense and hopless despair.Did he live hislife again in every detail of desire,temptation,and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowldge? He cried in a whisper at some image,at some vision-he cried out twice,a cry that was no more than a breath- 'The horror!The horror!'........"

Check this..

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.
They came through you,but not from you.
And though they are with you,yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love,but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies,but not their souls.
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,which you cannot visit,not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward,nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

Khalil Gibran.

Hello mates.The following passage is taken from one of Arthur Conan Doyle's short stories "Sharlock Holmes".One morning,Dr Watson,a friend of Sharlock's,grabbed a magazine and read the following article:

"From a drop of water a logician could infer the posibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.So,all life is a great chain,the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it.Like all other arts,the science of deducation and analysis is one which can only acquired by long and patient study,nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it.Before turning to those moral and mental aspects of the matter which present the greatest difficulties,let the inquirer begin by mastering more elementery problems.Let him,on meeting a follow-mortal,learn to distanguish the history of the man,and the trade or profession towhich he belongs.Such an exercise sharpens the faculties of observation and where to look for and what to look for"

So is the following..

"I will not serve that in which i no longer believe,whatever it call itself my home,my fatherland or my church;and i will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as i can,using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use,silence,exile,and cunning"
From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce

"Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider_web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air_borne particle in its tissue"
Henry James
The Art of Fiction

-Khalil Gibran “The Madman”
"1-First Self: Here, in this madman, I have dwelt all these years, with naught to do but renew his pain by day and recreate his sorrow by night. I can bear my fate no longer, and now I rebel.
2-Second Self: Yours is a better lot than mine, brother, for it is given to me to be this madman’s joyous self. I laugh his laughter and sing his happy hours, and with thrice winged feet I dance his brighter thoughts. It is I that would rebel against my weary existence.
3-Third Self: And what of me, the love-ridden self, the flaming brand of wild passion and fantastic desires? It is I the love-sick self who would rebel against this madman.
4-Fourth Self: I, amongst you all, am the most miserable, for naught was given me but odious hatred and destructive loathing. It is I, the tempest-like self, the one born in the black caves of Hell, who would protest against serving this madman.
5-Fifth Self: Nay, it is I, the thinking self, the fanciful self, the self of hunger and thirst, the one doomed to wander without rest in search of unknown things and things not yet created; it is I, not you, who would rebel.
6-Sixth Self: And I, the working self, the pitiful labourer, who, with patient hands, and longing eyes, fashion the days into images and give the formless elements new and eternal forms—it is I, the solitary one, who would rebel against this restless madman.
7-Seventh Self: How strange that you all would rebel against this man, because each and every one of you has a preordained fate to fulfill. Ah! could I but be like one of you, a self with a determined lot! But I have none, I am the do-nothing self, the one who sits in the dumb, empty nowhere and nowhen, while you are busy re-creating life. Is it you or I, neighbours, who should rebel?
When the seventh self thus spake the other six selves looked with pity upon him but said nothing more; and as the night grew deeper one after the other went to sleep enfolded with a new and happy submission.
But the seventh self remained watching and gazing at nothingness, which is behind all things.”

-Khalil Gibran “The Madman”

"Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood! Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.To be great is to be misunderstood"
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self-Relience

This passage is my favourite one conserning the novel "The Great Gatsby".It's the first Paragraph of the second chapter and it goes as follows:
About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

wow awesome
4 me my favorite part in my best Novel I ever learn( A Wlk To Remember) is :
" Love is always patient and kind.
It is never jealous.Love is never boastful or conceited.It is never rude or selfish.It does not take offense and is not resentful.Love takes no pleasure
in other people's sins.but delights in the truth.It is always ready to excuse,
to trust, to hope and to endure whatever comes."

This small passage is taken from "King Arthur and other stories" by Oscar Wilde :
"Actors are so fortunate.They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make mere, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different . Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualification".


I like too much this one, it is from the same book:
"I expect to pass throught this world but once, any good thing therfore that i can do, or any kindness that i can show to any follow-creature, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for i shall not pass this way again."

"What i must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.
This rule, equally arduous in actual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.
It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

Emerson, from [u]Self-Reliance

"society is a wave.The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not"
Emerson.

hello
i do like this collection of phylisophical passages.Thank you so much