You should pay no heed to what some yokel priest has prated of. What does he know? - Poul Anderson

I do not think the coerced mind ever really learns an art.

There was a huge sadness in it—the little men of today, gnawing apart the mighty works they no longer understood. In a few hundred years, or a few thousand, what did it matter? Nothing would be left, nothing but rubble and waving grass and the wild dogs howling where men had once lived.

Better a life like a falling star, bright across the dark, than a deathlessness which can see naught above or beyond itself.