Sepehr

“Leave me to my repose,’ is the motto of the sleeping and the dead. You might as well ask the paralytic to leap from his chair and throw away his crutch, or, without a miracle, to ‘take up his bed and walk,’ as expect the learned reader to throw down his book and think for himself. He clings to it for his intellectual support; and his dread of being left to himself is like the horror of a vacuum. He can only breathe a learned atmosphere, as other men breathe common air. He is a borrower of sense. He has no ideas of his own, and must live on those of other people. The habit of supplying our ideas from foreign sources ‘enfeebles all internal strength of thought,’ as a course of dram-drinking destroys the tone of the stomach.”
― William Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt

“The man who encompasses heaven and hell is a perfect man. But there are many heavens and more hells. The artist snatches fire from both. Surely the assassin feels no more intensely the lust of murder than the poet who depicts it in glowing words. The things he writes are as real to him as the things that he lives. But in his realm the poet is supreme. His hands may be red with blood or white with leprosy: he still remains king. Woe to him, however, if he transcends the limits of his kingdom and translates into action the secret of his dreams. The throng that before applauded him will stone his quivering body or nail to the cross his delicate hands and feet.”
― Viereck George Sylvester, The House of the Vampire

“Hassan lowered his head. "I have tasted the bitter kernel of the fruit of wisdom. There is no God. The religions of the world are like aging women; their beauty and fruitfulness are gone. They are shrinking to the dry bones of superstition; soon nothing will remain of them but the scraps of hair and hide and bone that are preserved like precious stones in the reliquaries and shrines. What is the Black Stone of Mecca but a
strange stone that is like iron? If I could cry a message to the listeners of the earth, I would say, 'Overthrow all altars and thrones. They who sit upon the thrones and they who guard the altars are no more than common men shielding themselves behind lies.' It is true that the Moslems who pray to Allah are no wiser than the pagans who made offerings to the sun in the beginning of time. Is it not true?”
― Harold Lamb, Omar Khayyam

“Think'st thou existence doth depend on time?
It doth; but actions are our epochs: mine
Have made my days and nights imperishable,
Endless, and all alike, as sands on the shore,
Innumerable atoms; and one desert,
Barren and cold, on which the wild waves break,
But nothing rests, save carcasses and wrecks,
Rocks, and the salt-surf weeds of bitterness.”
― Lord Byron, Manfred and Other Poems