Is there any reward?
I'm beginning to doubt it.
I am broken and bored,
Is there any reward?
Reassure me, Good Lord,
And inform me about it.
Is there any reward?
I'm beginning to doubt it.
Loss and possession, death and life are one, There falls no shadow where there shines no sun.
Hilaire BellocLife is a veil, its paths are dark and rough
Only because we do not know enough
When Science has discovered something more
We shall be happier than we were before.
The prospect of refreshment at the charges of another is an opportunity never to be neglected by men of clear commercial judgment.
Hilaire BellocWrite as the wind blows and command all words like an army!
Hilaire BellocTag: writing
If we are to be happy, decent and secure of our souls: drink some kind of fermented liquor with one's food; go on the water from time to time; dance on occasions, and sing in a chorus...
Hilaire BellocFor I know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of merriment in the soul of a sane man.
Hilaire Belloc...But that is a method for cowards; the brave man goes out into the hall, comes back with a stick, and says firmly, "You have just deliberately and cruelly exposed my ignorance before this company; I shall, therefore, beat you soundly with this stick in the presence of them all."
This you then do to him or he to you, mutatis mutandis, ceteris paribus; and that is all I have to say on Ignorance.
Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight,
But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.
The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too.He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.
We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.
Tag: work civilization consumption discipline barbarism barbarians
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