Ungrateful Quotes - page 3
Thou art-what? Let the still small voice of God help you to fill it in. Must the answer be, thou art-impure, intemperate, dishonest, untruthful, irreverent, blasphemous, selfish, covetous, careless, unkind, lukewarm, lazy, ungrateful, unforgiving, filled with hypocrisy, defeated, a slave? Thou art-. Be honest. Fill it in.
Kirby Page
But where repose the all Etruscan three-
Dante, and Petrarch, and, scarce less than they,
The Bard of Prose, creative Spirit! he
Of the Hundred Tales of Love?
And have their Country's Marbles nought to say?
Could not her quarries furnish forth one bust?
Did they not to her breast their filial earth entrust?
Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar,
Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore,
and the crown
Which Petrarch's laureate brow supremely wore,
Upon a far and foreign soil had grown,
His Life, his Fame, his Grave, though rifled-not thine own.
Petrarch
They dug too far into physics and it bit them. Physics will do that. It's an ungrateful piece of shit. It's a fickle lover that will always betray you. It courts you, gives you rewards, coughs up little treats like fire and the wheel, telescopes and the secret of starflight, makes you think you're worth it, that you're the special one, that you really, really matter to it....All the while it's saving up this nasty little truth: that every thought, every deed, every hope you've ever held is futile. That the universe will end, and forget itself. That there is no such thing as meaning....
"Do you believe it?” Goma asked.
"Of course I believe it. Physics doesn't give a damn about how we feel. It doesn't give a damn about a sleeping soundly in our beds, thinking we matter.
Alastair Reynolds
We hide this universality if we can, but it appears at all points. We are as ungrateful as children. There is nothing we cherish and strive to draw to us but in some hour we turn and rend it. We keep a running fire of sarcasm at ignorance and the life of the senses; then goes by, perchance, a fair girl, a piece of life, gay and happy, and making the commonest offices beautiful by the energy and heart with which she does them; and seeing this we admire and love her and them, and say, "Lo! a genuine creature of the fair earth, not dissipated or too early ripened by books, philosophy, religion, society, or care!" insinuating a treachery and contempt for all we had so long loved and wrought in ourselves and others.
Ralph Waldo Emerson