Robert Webster

“What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Selected Writings

“O smile, going where? O upturned look:
new, warm, receding surge of the heart--;
alas, we are that surge. Does then the
cosmic space
we dissolve in taste of us? Do the
angels
reclaim only what is theirs, their own
outstreamed existence,
or sometimes, by accident, does a bit
of us
get mixed in? Are we blended in their
features
like the slight vagueness that
complicates the looks
of pregnant women? Unnoticed by them
in their
whirling back into themselves? (How
could they notice?)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden