Though my soul may set in darkness,
it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too fondly
to be fearful of the night.
- Sarah Williams
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
- William Ernest Henley
I was walking down a dirt road,
smiling at nothing, happy as a man can be.
I didn’t have a dime inside my jeans,
but I was richer than a pharaoh king.
Feeling the breezes blowing across my face,
taking my own sweet time,
Loving when’er love was given,
and getting high on a satisfied mind.
(from “Satisfied Mind”, by Bob Morris)
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
-w.b.yeats
Heaven from all creatures hides the book of Fate,
All but the page prescribed, their present state:
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know:
Or who could suffer being here below?
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.
Oh, blindness to the future! kindly given,
That each may fill the circle, marked by Heaven:
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.
Hope humbly, then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher Death; and God adore.
What future bliss, He gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind;
His soul, proud science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk, or milky way;
Yet simple Nature to his hope has given,
Behind the cloud-topped hill, an humbler heaven;
Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,
Some happier island in the watery waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.
To be, contents his natural desire,
He asks no angel’s wing, no seraph’s fire;
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.
- Alexander Pope, Essays on Man
It’s so simple to be happy, but it’s so difficult to be simple.
In the world’s audience hall, the simple blade of grass sits on the same carpet with the sunbeams, and the stars of midnight
- Rabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) Indian philosopher, poet; winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. also known as Rabi Thakur.
.pharaoh.
e (dot) pharaoh (at) gmail (dot) com
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