Themes

"Again she plunges! hark! a second shock Bilges the splitting vessel on the rock; Down on the vale of death, with dismal cries, The fated victims shuddering cast their eyes In wild despair; while yet another stroke With strong convulsion rends the solid oak: Ah Heaven!—behold her crashing ribs divide! She loosens, parts, and spreads in ruin o'er the tide."

"Then rose from sea to sky the wild farewell— Then shriek'd the timid, and stood still the brave,— Then some leap'd overboard with fearful yell, As eager to anticipate their grave."

"Some hoisted out the boats, and there was one That begged Pedrillo for an absolution, Who told him to be damn'd,—in his confusion."

"It was a touching answer of a Christian sailor, when asked why he remained so calm in a fearful storm, when the sea seemed ready to devour the ship. He was not sure that he could swim. "But," he said, "though I sink I shall only drop into the hollow of my Father's hand; for He holds all these waters there.""

"And finds with keen, discriminating sight, Black's not so black—nor white so very white."

"Vision without implementation is hallucination."

"In the Middle Ages society was far more static and was essentially hierarchical in nature. As a result the causal or genetic attitude was far less important in medieval thought that it is in ours and the concept of evolution had little influence compared with the role of symbolism in the general world-view... Moreover, even the concept of time itself was of less significance to historians... For St Augustine the date of an event was of far less importance than its theological significance. His tendency to see everything in a theological rather than in a historical perspective was a powerful influence in the Middle Ages... It was not until the nineteenth century that the fundamental significance of the historical perspective came to be generally recognized. This was several hundred years after the theory and practice of perspective had been developed by painters and others. In each case a new way of looking at the world resulted."

"For any man with half an eye, What stands before him may espy; But optics sharp it needs I ween, To see what is not to be seen."

"Vision is the Art of seeing Things invisible."

"Therefore, anyone who now wants to ask God for visions or revelations would seem to be doing God an injustice by not fixing their eyes entirely on Christ and wanting anything else or anything new."

"I can read and see the words that you have confined behind the wall of your lips in the expression on your face and in the gaze of your eyes."

"From now on, everything in life will appear blurry to me. What’s the point of wiping my glasses when my vision has already left me?"

"All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage."

"The ruins of himself! now worn away With age, yet still majestic in decay."

"What cities, as great as this, have … promised themselves immortality! Posterity can hardly trace the situation of some. The sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins of others…. Here stood their citadel, but now grown over with weeds; there their senate-house, but now the haunt of every noxious reptile; temples and theatres stood here, now only an undistinguished heap of ruins."

"While in the progress of their long decay, Thrones sink to dust, and nations pass away."

"There is a temple in ruin stands, Fashion'd by long forgotten hands: Two or three columns, and many a stone, Marble and granite, with grass o'ergrown!"

"And when 'midst fallen London they survey The stone where Alexander's ashes lay, Shall own with humble pride the lesson just By Time's slow finger written in the dust."

"Should the whole frame of nature round him break In ruin and confusion hurled, He, unconcerned, would hear the mighty crack, And stand secure amidst a falling world."

"We wonder — and some Hunter may express Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace, He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess What powerful but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place."

"I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart [sic]. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away."

"Ruins of Ind! Here, too, with busy hand, Hath man built shrines, and gorgeous cities plann'd, That Time may mock his toil?—and must he still For weeds and reptiles ply his plastic skill?"

"The value of ruins is still today directly dependent on the degree to which their destruction is visible, for that allows their very status as cultural heritage to be experienced directly."

"Final Ruin fiercely drives Her ploughshare o'er creation."

"Where now is Britain? * * * * Even as the savage sits upon the stone That marks where stood her capitols, and hears The bittern booming in the weeds, he shrinks From the dismaying solitude."

"I do love these ancient ruins. We never tread upon them but we set Our foot upon some reverend history."

"The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, in time a Vergil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last some curious traveller from Lima will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul's, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra."

"Who knows but that hereafter some traveller like myself will sit down upon the banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the Zuyder Zee, where now, in the tumult of enjoyment, the heart and the eyes are too slow to take in the multitude of sensations? Who knows but he will sit down solitary amid silent ruins, and weep a people inurned and their greatness changed into an empty name?"

"Etiam quæ sibi quisque timebat Unius in miseri exitium conversa tulere."

"Behold this ruin! 'Twas a skull Once of ethereal spirit full! This narrow cell was Life's retreat; This place was Thought's mysterious seat! What beauteous pictures fill'd that spot, What dreams of pleasure, long forgot! Nor Love, nor Joy, nor Hope, nor Fear, Has left one trace, one record here."

"Red ruin and the breaking-up of all."

"In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cost the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians."

"Prostrate the beauteous ruin lies; and all That shared its shelter, perish in its fall."

"For such a numerous host Fled not in silence through the frighted deep With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout, Confusion worse confounded."

"She [the Roman Catholic Church] may still exist in undiminished vigour, when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's."

"Gaudensque viam fecisse ruina."

"When I have been indulging this thought I have, in imagination, seen the Britons of some future century, walking by the banks of the Thames, then overgrown with weeds and almost impassable with rubbish. The father points to his son where stood St. Paul's, the Monument, the Bank, the Mansion House, and other places of the first distinction."

"Babylon is fallen, is fallen."

"History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription moulders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?"

"For, to make deserts, God, who rules mankind, Begins with kings, and ends the work by wind."

"O! lady, we receive but what we give, And in our life alone doth nature live; Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud!"

"But as some muskets so contrive it As oft to miss the mark they drive at, And though well aimed at duck or plover Bear wide, and kick their owners over."

"Lento quidem gradu ad vindictam divina procedit ira, sed tarditatem supplicii gravitate compensat."

"Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small; Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all."

"Ut sit magna tamen certe lenta ira deorum est."

"The ways of the gods are long, but in the end they are not without strength."

"The divine power moves with difficulty, but at the same time surely."

"I must confess that my estimate of Lovecraft would not have pleased his most ardent admirers. The view I expressed in that book was that, while Lovecraft was distinctly a creative genius in his own way, his pessimism should not be taken too seriously; that it was the pessimism of a sick recluse, and had about it an element of rassentiment, a kind of desire to take revenge on the world that rejected him. In short, Lovecraft was a 19th century romantic, born in the wrong time. Most men of genius dislike their own age, but the really great ones impose their own vision on the age. The weak ones turn away into a world of gloomy fantasy."

"Be ready, gods, with all your thunderbolts; Dash him to pieces!"

"To be left alone And face to face with my own crime, had been Just retribution."