Strive Beyond, Not Toward

The following are from Handful of Beach Sand by Kalil Gibran:

They tell me: If you see a slave sleeping do not wake him lest he be dreaming of freedom.
I tell them: If you see a slave sleeping, wake him and explain to him freedom.

The river continues on its way to the sea, broken the wheel of the mill or not.

There are among the people murderers who have never committed murder, thieves who have never stolen, and liars who have spoken nothing but the truth.

Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.

O great intelligent Being! hidden and existing in and for the universe, You can hear me because You are within me and You can see me because You are all-seeing; please drop within my soul a seed of Your wisdom to grow a sapling in your forest and to give of Your fruit. Amen!

— All of the above are excerpted from Kahlil Gibran's Handful of Beach Sand

Who pities those who wait? They are easily recognized: by their gentleness, by their falsely attentive looks — attentive, yes, but to something other than what they are looking at — by their absent-mindedness.
— Pauline Réage, Story of O, p. 90.

Being absurd as well as beautiful,
Magic — like art — is a hoax redeemed by awe.
(Not priest but clown, the shuddering sorcerer
Is more astounded than his rapt applauders:
"Then all those props and Easters of my stage
Came true? But I was joking all the time!")
Art. being bartender, is never drunk;
And magic that believes itself, must die.
....
— From "A Walk on Snow," #3, Peter Viereck

Here at last, men must have felt was a cause compared with which the grandest of historic causes had been trivial. It was doubtless because it could have commanded millions of martyrs, that none were needed. The change of a dynasty in a petty kingdom of the old world often cost more lives than did the revolution which set the feet of the human race at last in the right way.
     Doubtless it ill beseems one to whom the boon of life in our resplendent age has been vouchsafed to wish his destiny other, and yet I have often thought that I would fain exchange my share in this serene and golden day for a place in that stormy epoch of transition, when heroes burst the barred gate of the future and revealed to the kindling gaze of a hopeless race, in place of the blank wall that had closed its path, a vista of progress whose end, for very excess of light, still dazzles us. Ah, my friends! who will say that to have lived then, when the weakest influence was a lever to whose touch the centuries trembled, was not worth a share even in this era of fruition?
—  Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, p.232.