Take a Hard Write

     The lotus is a very unusual flower, large and beautiful, but grows in very muddy water. When it blossoms there is no dirt, no mud ... only beautiful flowers ... so fragrant! Dirt doesn't cling to the lotus. When we were small we used to throw mud on the flowers just to watch it roll off. Dirty water rolls off in beads, as if the petals are made of wax. We can learn from this.
     We go through muddy water in our life. This should not stop us from blossoming. We can have turmoil, conflict, disappointment, whatever dark muddy things, but still we can blossom. A Chinese proverb says, "He who has tasted the bitterest of bitterness can be a man above men." From this we see that our turmoil and conflict and even our pain have their value. They add to our growth, develop our character, and teach us compassion.
— Lily Siou, in Diary of the Way, Ira Lerner, p. 89.

....Why does one not like things if there are other people about? Why cannot one make one's books live except in the night, after hours of straining? and you know they have to be your own books too, and you have to read them more than once. I think they take in something of your personality, and your environment also — you know a second hand book sometimes is so much more flesh and blood than a new one — and it is almost terrible to think that your ideas, yourself in your books, may be giving life to generations of readers after you are forgotten. It is that specially which makes one need good books: books that will be worthy of what you are going to put into them. What would you think of a great sculptor who flung away his gifts on modeling clay or sand? Imagination should be put into the most precious caskets, and that is why one can only live in the future or the past, in Utopia or the Wood beyond the World. Father won't know all this — but if you get the right book at the right time you taste joys — not only bodily, physical, but spiritual also, which pass one out above and beyond one's miserable self, as it were through a huge air, following the light of another man's thought. And you can never be quite the old self again. You have forgotten a little bit: or rather pushed it out with a little of the inspiration of what is immortal in someone who has gone before you.
— T. E. Lawrence, in Letters to Mother, Charles Van Doren (ed.), pp. 66-67.

Ah, dear Mother, is any time left us in which to be happy? I dare not hope so. To be forty, under a conceil judiciaire [a financial trustee], with immense debts, and finally, worse than all, my will gone; ruined! Who can say if the intelligence itself be not dried up? I know nothing. I cannot know anything, since I have lost even the ability to make an effort.
     Before all, I want to say something which I do not say often enough to you, and which you no doubt do not know, most of all if you judge me by appearances; it is that my love for you grows without ceasing. I am ashamed to confess that that love does not give me strength enough to raise myself. I look at the past years, the awful years, and spend my time reflecting on the brevity of life; nothing more! and my will rusts more and more. If ever man knew, in youth, bile and hypochondria, that man is myself. Yet I  long to live, and would fain taste a little security, glory, and contentment with myself. Some terrible thing says to me: Never, and again something else says, try.
     With so many plans and projects, accumulated in the two or three portfolios I dare no longer open, what am I likely to achieve? Perhaps nothing, it may be.
— Charles Baudelaire, Feb. of Mar. 1861, in Ibid., p. 186.

     Do you think that deeds of wrong fly up on wings to heaven, and then someone writes them on tablets of Zeus, who looks upon the record and gives judgment upon men? Why, the whole heaven would not suffice for Zeus to write men's sins thereon, nor Zeus himself to consider them and send a punishment for each.. No; Justice is here, close at hand, if you will but see it.
— Euripides, Melanippe, frag. 506, in Greek Religious Thought, F. M. Cornford, p. 154.

We are all dullards in divinity; we know nothing.
— Anaxandrides, Canephorus, in Ibid., p. 248.