Nathaniel Westermann

“Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead”
― Yamamoto Tsunetomo

“The moment one conceives the meaning of human greatness is the moment when one understands the baseness, the triviality and the meanness of the material from which we have to mould it.”
― Bill Hopkins

“That night Glanton stared long into the embers of the fire. All about him his men were sleeping but much was changed. So many gone, defected or dead. The Delawares all slain. He watched the fire and if he saw portents there it was much the same to him. He would live to look upon the western sea and he was equal to whatever might follow for he was complete at every hour. Whether his history should run concomitant with men and nations, whether it should cease. He’d long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men’s destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he’d drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he’d ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them. Across”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

“We have replaced the religious passions with Christian social virtues, and to talk of Man’s triumph in terms of mercy, charity, or compassion is as senseless as expecting to find a Christ standing his turn of beers in a Paddington public house.”
― Bill Hopkins