Quotes, Poems And Other Writings Are The Business.

THE HUNTING OF THE DRAGON

~G.K. Chesterton

WHEN we went hunting the Dragon

In the days when we were young,

We tossed the bright world over our shoulder

As bugle and baldrick slung;

Never was the world so wild and fair

As what went by on the wind,

Never such fields of paradise

As the fields we left behind:

For this is the best of a rest for men

That should rise and ride

Making a flying fairyland

Of market and country-side,

Wings on the cottage, wings on the wood,

Wings upon pot and pan,

For the hunting of the Dragon

That is the life of a man.

For men grow weary of fairyland

When the Dragon is a dream,

And tire of the talking bird in the tree,

The singing fish in the stream;

And the wandering stars grow stale, grow stale,

And the wonder is stiff with scorn;

For this is the honour of fairyland

And the following of the horn;

Beauty on beauty called us back

When we could rise and ride,

And a woman looked out of every window

As wonderful as a bride:

And the tavern-sign as a tabard blazed,

And the children cheered and ran,

For the love of the hate of the Dragon

That is the pride of a man.

The sages called him a shadow

And the light went out of the sun:

And the wise men told us that all was well

And all was weary and one:

And then, and then, in the quiet garden,

With never a weed to kill,

We knew that his shining tale had shone

In the white road over the hill:

We knew that the clouds were flakes of flame,

We knew that the sunset fire

Was red with the blood of the Dragon

Whose death is the world’s desire.

For the horn was blown in the heart of the night

That men should rise and ride,

Keeping the tryst of a terrible jest

Never for long untried;

Drinking a dreadful blood for wine,

Never in cup or can,

The death of a deathless Dragon,

That is the life of a man.

“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”

Alan Watts 

“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”

Marcus Aurelius

“You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of -- something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for". We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

C.S. Lewis

“ Life is never incomplete if it is an honorable one. At whatever point you leave life, if you leave it in the right way, it is whole.”

Seneca



“You can’t go back & change the beginning, but you can start where you are & change the ending.” C.S. Lewis

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.” Seneca