What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.
The lapse of ages changes all things – time, language, the earth, the bounds of the sea, the stars of the sky, and every thing about, around, and underneath man, except man himself.
There are four questions of value in life, Don Octavio. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same. Only love.
The leaves along the limpid streams of Eden? Is your course measur’d for ye? Or do ye Sweep on in your unbounded revelry Through an aerial universe of endless Expansion,–at which my soul aches to think,– Intoxicated with eternity.
I live, but live to die: and, living, see nothing to make death hateful, save an innate clinging, a loathsome and yet all invincible instinct of life, which I abhor, as I despise myself, yet cannot overcome – and so I live. Would I had never lived!
