Writing on the wall Quotes

“It is also a warning. It is a warning that, if nobody reads the writing on the wall, man will be reduced to the state of the beast, whom he is shaming by his manners.”

“My mind is like a little house,My peers break into.They rearrange my furniture,And the cabinets rifle through.They throw things out;They put things in,And erase the writing on the wall,And by the time that they walk out,It's not my mind at all.”

“In moments of peace such as I experienced that day with Edal there exists some unritual reunion with the rest of creation without which the lives of many are trivial. 'Extinct' applies as much to an essential mental attitude as to the vanished creatures of the earth such as the Dodo. We can no longer await some scientific revelation to avoid the destruction of our species in this context; the evidence is all there, the writing on the wall. The way back cannot be the same for all of us, but for those like myself it means a descent of the rungs until we stand again amid the other creatures of the earth and share to some small extent their vision of it, even though this may be labelled Wordsworthian romanticism.”

“Naphta loathed the bourgeois state and its love of security. He found occasion to express this loathing one autumn afternoon when, as they were walking along the main street, it suddenly began to rain and, as if on command, there was an umbrella over every head. That was a symbol of cowardice and vulgar effeminacy, the end product of civilization. An incident like the sinking of the Titanic was atavistic, true, but its effect was most refreshing, it was the handwriting on the wall. Afterward, of course, came the hue and cry for more security in shipping. How pitiful, but such weak-willed humanitarianism squared very nicely with the wolfish cruelty and villainy of slaughter on the economic battlefield known as the bourgeois state. War, war ! He was all for it – the universal lust for war seemed quite honorable in comparison.”

“A word can change a mind, a sentence can change a life and a book can change the world.”