The modern world was not alive to the tremendous Reality that encompassed it. We were surrounded by an immeasurable abyss of darkness and splendor. W… - Alfred Noyes

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The modern world was not alive to the tremendous Reality that encompassed it. We were surrounded by an immeasurable abyss of darkness and splendor. We built our empires on a pellet of dust revolving around a ball of fire in unfathomable space. Life, that Sphynx, with the human face and the body of a brute, asked us new riddles every hour. Matter itself was dissolving under the scrutiny of Science; and yet, in our daily lives, we were becoming a race of somnambulists, whose very breathing, in train and bus and car, was timed to the movement of the wheels; and the more perfectly, and even alertly, we clicked through our automatic affairs on the surface of things, the more complete was our insensibility to the utterly inscrutable mystery that anything should be in existence at all.

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About Alfred Noyes

Alfred Noyes (16 September 1880 – 28 June 1958) was an English poet, short-story writer and playwright.

Biography information from Wikiquote

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Additional quotes by Alfred Noyes

Stand like a beaten anvil, when thy dream
Is laid upon thee, golden from the fire.
Flinch not, though heavily through that furnace-gleam
The black forge-hammers fall on thy desire.

Demoniac giants round thee seem to loom.
'Tis but the world-smiths heaving to and fro.
Stand like a beaten anvil. Take the doom
Their ponderous weapons deal thee, blow on blow.

Needful to truth as dew-fall to the flower
Is this wild wrath and this implacable scorn.
For every pang, new beauty, and new power,
Burning blood-red shall on thy heart be born.

Stand like a beaten anvil. Let earth's wrong
Beat on that iron and ring back in song.

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A thousand creeds and battle-cries, A thousand warring social schemes, A thousand new moralities,
And twenty thousand thousand dreams! Each on his own anarchic way, From the old order breaking free, — Our ruined world desires, you say, License, once more, not Liberty.

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