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What good, what use, what aim?
What compensation for the throes of birth
And death in all its frame?
What conscious life hath ever paid its cost?
From Nothingness to Nothingness — all lost!

— James Thomson

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Philosophy

More quotes by James Thomson

For life is but a dream whose shapes return,
Some frequently, some seldom, some by night
And some by day.

The City of Dreadful Night (1870)

The world rolls round for ever like a mill;
It grinds out death and life and good and ill;
It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.

The City of Dreadful Night (1870)

Yet I strode on austere;
No hope could have no fear.

The City of Dreadful Night (1870)

Yet why evoke the spectres of black night
To blot the sunshine of exultant years?

The City of Dreadful Night (1870)

The street-lamps burn amidst the baleful glooms,
Amidst the soundless solitudes immense
Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs.

The City of Dreadful Night (1870)

All James Thomson quotes →

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped.

Robert Anton Wilson

Every morning
I shall concern myself anew about the boundary
Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No
And pressing forward honor reality.

Martin Buber Power and Love (1926)

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended.

John C. Lilly The Human Biocomputer (1974)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: James Thomson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.