The Dragons

by Dean Williams

Quotations That Wish They Were at the Front

  Is not belief the true God-announcing miracle?

  Novalis

  Technology is the real metaphysics of the twentieth century.

  Ernst Jünger

  Love too shall yield to me.

  Ovid

  For God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.

  Francis Bacon

  Nothing of him doth fade/ But doth suffer a sea-change/ Into something rich and strange.

  From The Tempest (William Shakespeare)

  Perfection consists in becoming something rather than in having something.

  Matthew Arnold

  Where there is no vision, the people perish.

  Proverbs, 29:18

  We must begin to choose afresh, for the pure, great truth…But there must be a new heaven and a new earth, a clearer, eternal moon above, and a clean world below. So it will be.

  D.H. Lawrence

  For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth.

  Isaiah 65:17

  The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

  Robert Maynard Hutchins

  We hold the future still timidly, but perceive it for the first time, as a function of our own action. Having seen it, are we to turn away from something that offends the very nature of our earliest desires, or is the recognition of our new powers sufficient to change those desires into the service of the future which they will have to bring about?

  Desmond Bernal

  Knowledge without conscience is the ruin of the soul.

  Rabelais

  Reason is the enemy of all greatness: reason is the enemy of nature: nature is great, reason is small.

  Giacomo Leopardi

  Had I a mighty gun/ I think I’d shoot the human race/ And then to glory run!

  Emily Dickinson

  The historic development of kingship seems to have been accompanied by a collective shift from the rites of fertility to the wider cult of physical power. This displacement was never complete, for Osiris, Bacchus and Kybele lived on and even reclaimed their old position. But at the opening of civilization it brought about a change of outlook, accompanied by a progressive loss of understanding of the needs of life, and a gross over-estimation of the role of physical prowess and organized control as determinates of communal life, not just in a crisis but in the daily routine. Backed by military force, the king's word was law. The power to command, to seize property, to kill, to destroy-- all these were, and have remained, 'sovereign powers'. Thus a paranoid psychal structure was preserved and transmitted by the walled city: the collective expression of a too heavily armoured personality.

  Lewis Mumford

  O God! That one might read the book of fate,

  And see the revolution of the times

  Make mountains level, and the continent,

  Weary of solid firmness, melt itself

  Into the sea.

  From Henry IV, Part 2 (William Shakespeare)

  ...glints of the evil that one sees in the power of this world.

  Robert Duncan

  The fact that one cannot comprehend how God could be is evidence for his existence.

  Søren Kierkegaard

  I am confident it must be the poor, the simple and mean things of this earth that must confound the mighty and strong.

  Richard Overton, Leveller

  Bring me my bow of burning gold!

  Bring me my arrows of desire!

  Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!

  Bring me my chariot of fire!

  William Blake (from Jerusalem)

  Has some Vast Imbecility

  Mighty to build and blend

  But impotent to tend,

  Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry?

  Or come of an Automaton

  Unconscious of our pains?...

  Or are we live remains

  Of Godhead dying downwards, brain and eye now gone?

  Thomas Hardy

  Naught in the world keeps an immortal stay,

  The earth, nor mortal kingdoms, golden Rome,

  Nor sea, nor land, nor the star fires of heaven.

  He that begat all things hath set one day

  Irrevocable when the ultimate flame

  Shall in its torrent sweep away the world.

  Juvencus

  Belief,

  As Unbelief before, shakes us by fits…

  Just when we are safest there’s a

  sunset touch,

  A fancy from a flower-bell, someone’s

  Death,

  A chorus-ending from Euripides,--

  And that’s enough for fifty hopes and fears

  As old and new at once as Nature’s self,

  To rap and knock and enter in our soul,

  Take hands and dance there, a fantastic

  ring,

  Round the ancient idol, on his base

  again,--

  The grand Perhaps!

  Robert Browning

  There are no masses, only ways of seeing people as masses.

  Raymond Williams

  The bare emptiness of life without belief.

  Ifor Evans

  To go to Rome, much labour, little profit. The King whom thou desirest, if thou bringest Him not with thee, thou wilt find Him not.

  Thesaurus Paleohibernicus (Translator Whitley Stokes)

  Man in his capacity for love touches divinity.

  Kenneth Knickerbocker

  I never may believe

  These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.

  Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

  Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

  More than cool reason ever comprehends

  From A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare

  The absolute test by which revolution can be distinguished, is the change in the form of activity of a society, in its deepest structure of relationships and feelings…A society in which revolution is necessary is a society in which the incorporation of all its people, as whole human beings, is in practice impossible without a change in its fundamental forms of relationships. Revolution remains necessary, in these circumstances, not only because some men desire it, but because there can be no acceptable human order while the full humanity of any class of men is in practice denied.

  Raymond Williams

  The poorest folk are our neighbors if we look about us—the prisoners in dungeons and the poor in their hovels, overburdened with children, and rack-rented by landlords. For whatever they save by spinning they spend on rent, or on milk and oatmeal to make gruel and fill the bellies of their children who clamour for food. And they themselves are often famished with hunger, and wretched with the miseries of winter—cold sleepless nights, when they get u to rock the cradle cramped in a corner and rise before dawn to card and comb the wool, to wash and scrub and mend…There are many more who suffer like them—men who go hungry and thirsty all day long, and strive their utmost to hide it—ashamed to beg, or tell their neighbors of their need. I’ve seen enough of the world to know how they suffer, these men who have many children and no means but their trade to clothe and feed them. For many hands are waiting to grasp the few pence they earn….

  William Langland (from Piers the Plowman)

  Note

  For sheer egotistical reasons I wish to call the reader’s attention to my poetry blog: https://puritano.wordpress.com/. Check it out!

  Also, I have a free e-book entitled “The TV Monsters” which you can retrieve at

  And believe it or not, I think there’s a graphic novel in this whole thing crying to get out. I think. If you feel the same way and are a graphic artist, contact me at heianwilliams65@yahoo.com.

  Or, if you feel inspired to write me a gushing fan letter, by all means do so. But please, don’t beg me to co-author a fantasy novel with Geor
ge R.R. Martin. I won’t do it, no matter how many times he asks.

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  A few years ago I experimented with developing simple, content-based websites with some audio. The target audience was my students, who are learning English as a second language. The stuff is still up there—free, spotty in quality, but possibly useful to anyone homeschooling their children.

  wonderofknowledge.wordpress.com

  heianstories.wordpress.com

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  I listened to some ambient music from Karl Verkade while writing this. Support our indie musicians!

  https://karlverkade.bandcamp.com