Summits Quotes

Comedy keeps the heart sweet; but we all know that there is wholesome refreshment for both mind and heart in an occasional climb among the pomps of the intellectual snow-summits built by Shakespeare and those others. ~ Mark Twain

Choose a summit; make a plan to reach there! If you think you can't make it, choose a new summit, make another plan. Or give up the summits, make new plans, find lower targets! In short, be 'flexible' in life! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Mountains are both journey and destination. They summon us to climb their slopes, explore their canyons, and attempt their summits. The summit, despite months of preparation and toil, is never guaranteed though tastes of sweet nectar when reached. If my only goal as a teacher and mountaineer is the summit, I risk cruel failure if I do not reach the highest apex. Instead, if I accept the mountain's invitation to journey and create meaning in each step, success is manifest in every moment. ~ T.A. Loeffler

A price has to be paid for success. Almost invariably those who have reached the summits worked harder and longer, studied and planned more assiduously, practiced more self- denial, overcame more difficulties than those of us who have not risen so far. ~ B.C. Forbes

When God made the world he made the big plain just for the cavalry. It was firm, or would be when the sun had dried off the night's rain, and it was mostly level. The sabres could fall like scythes in the corn. The Arapiles, Greater and Lesser, God made for the gunners. From their summits, conveniently made flat so that the artillery could have a stable platform, the guns could dominate the plain. God had made nothing for the infantry, except a soil easily dug into graves, but the infantry were used to that. All ~ Bernard Cornwell

It is remarkable how weak international political responses have been. The failure of global summits on the environment make it plain that our politics are subject to technology and finance. ~ Pope Francis

Nations touch at their summits. ~ Walter Bagehot

Mountains have the power to call us into their realms and there, left forever, are our friends whose great souls were longing for the heights. Do not forget the mountaineers who have not returned from the summits. ~ Anatoli Boukreev

When I took part in European leaders summits, it was sometimes unpleasant for me to hear Romanian, Polish, Portuguese, and Italian friends speak English, although I admit that on an informal basis, first contacts can be made in this language. Nevertheless, I will defend everywhere the use of the French language. ~ Francois Hollande

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Climb to the summits not to defeat the mountains but to ease their lonelinesses! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

In the stillness of the night I have walked in your streets, and my spirit has entered your houses,
And your heart-beats were in my heart, and your breath was upon my face, and I knew you all.
Aye, I knew your joy and your pain, and in your sleep your dreams were my dreams.
And oftentimes I was among you a lake among the mountains.
I mirrored the summits in you and the bending slopes, and even the passing flocks of your thoughts and your desires.
And to my silence came the laughter of your children in streams, and the longing of your youths in rivers. ~ Kahlil Gibran

We have not wings we cannot soar; but, we have feet to scale and climb, by slow degrees, by more and more, the cloudy summits of our time. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Our life is like a land journey, too even and easy and dull over long distances across the plains, too hard and painful up the steep grades; but, on the summits of the mountain, you have a magnificent view
and feel exalted
and your eyes are full of happy tears
and you want to sing
and wish you had wings! And then
you can't stay there, but must continue your journey
you begin climbing down the other side, so busy with your footholds that your summit experience is forgotten. ~ Lloyd C. Douglas

Asking why separates opportunity from a distracting time waste. When opportunities abound (meetups, Twitter chats, speed networking, reunions, summits, and seminars), how do you efficiently and quickly sort the productive from the less than productive? Here's the why filter I use: Is the opportunity aligned with my goal(s)? Will my participation add value to the other attendees and be valuable for me? Does the opportunity expand my network and/or strengthen existing relationships? What does my gut say? (Yes, I'm a big believer in trusting your gut.) ~ J. Kelly Hoey

Who would attain to summits still and fair,Must nerve himself through valleys of despair. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Occasionally there came gusts of winds, breezes from the sea rolling in one sweep over the whole plateau of the Caux country, which brought even to these fields a salt freshness. The rushes, close to the ground, whistled; the branches trembled in a swift rustling, while their summits, ceaselessly swaying, kept up a deep murmur. ~ Gustave Flaubert

The Long March The Red Army is not afraid of hardship on the march, the long march. Ten thousand waters and a thousand mountains are nothing. The Five Sierras meander like small waves, the summits of Wumeng pour on the plain like balls of clay. Cliffs under clouds are warm and washed below by the River Gold Sand. Iron chains are cold, reaching over the Tatu River. The far snows of Minshan only make us happy and when the army pushes through, we all laugh. October 1935 ~ Mao Zedong

International summits and organisations like WTO take decisions, which will bind us, and if we are not present in such summits, we may be hurt by the decisions taken. ~ Narendra Modi

There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits. ~ Karl Marx

The fleeting hour of life of those who love the hills is quickly spent, but the hills are eternal. Always there will be the lonely ridge, the dancing beck, the silent forest; always there will be the exhilaration of the summits. These are for the seeking, and those who seek and find while there is still time will be blessed both in mind and body. ~ Alfred Wainwright

How beautiful the sky looked, how blue and calm and deep! How brilliant and majestic was the setting sun! How tenderly shone the distant waters of the Danube! And fairer still were the purpling mountains stretching far away beyond the river, the convent, the mysterious gorges, the pine forests veiled in mist to their summits.
...There all was peace and happiness. 'I should wish for nothing, wish for nothing, for nothing in the world, if only I were there', thought Rostov. 'In myself alone and in that sunshine there is so much happiness'... ~ Leo Tolstoy

In my state of spiritual abstraction, I no longer belong to myself and to my eyesight. I am nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung, floating over the mists and summits. ~ Reinhold Messner

I have defended the interests of France at the G8 in Washington; afterwards I was at Chicago to announce the withdrawal of French troops from Afghanistan; I have participated in two European summits, so I have fully respected the engagements I made to the French. ~ Francois Hollande

The splendour falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story: The long light shakes across the lakes, And the wild cataract leaps in glory. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

Was that not the way it ought to be? The beauty of Bruges lay in being dead. From the top of the belfry it appeared completely dead to Borluut. He did not want to go back down ever again. His love for the town was greater, was endless. From now on it was a kind of frenzy, his final sensual pleasure. Constantly climbing high above the world, he started to enjoy death. There is danger in rising too high, into the unbreathable air of the summits. Disdain for the world, for life itself brings its own punishment. ~ Georges Rodenbach

May I free myself from the ever-pressing chest and enter the garden of imagination by leisurely hiding brain on hill summits. ~ Suman Pokhrel

New skin, a new land! And a land of liberty, if that is possible! I chose the geology of a land that was new to me, and that was young, virgin, and without drama, that of America. I traveled in America, but instead of romantically and directly rubbing the snakeskin of my body against the asperities of its terrain, I preferred to peel protected within the armor of the gleaming black crustacean of a Cadillac which I gave Gala as a present. Nevertheless all the men who admire and the women who are in love with my old skin will easily be able to find its remnants in shredded pieces of various sizes scattered to the winds along the roads from New York via Pittsburgh to California. I have peeled with every wind; pieces of my skin have remained caught here and there along my way, scattered through that "promised land" which is America; certain pieces of this skin have remained hanging in the spiny vegetation of the Arizona desert, along the trails where I galloped on horseback, where I got rid of all my former Aristotelian "planetary notions." Other pieces of my skin have remained spread out like tablecloths without food on the summits of the rocky masses by which one reaches the Salt Lake, in which the hard passion of the Mormons saluted in me the European phantom of Apollinaire. Still other pieces have remained suspended along the "antediluvian" bridge of San Francisco, where I saw in passing the ten thousand most beautiful virgins in America, completely naked, standing in line on ~ Salvador Dali

The intellectual summits of my life had been completing my dissertation and publishing my book, and that was already more than ten years ago. Intellectual summits? Summits, full stop. In those days, at least, I'd felt justified. Since then I hadn't produced anything except a few short articles for the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies, plus a couple for The Literary Review, when some new book touched on my field of expertise. My articles were clear, incisive and brilliant. They were generally well received, especially since I never missed a deadline. But was that enough to justify a life? ~ Michel Houellebecq

Like any currency of value, the human imagination is a coin with two inseparable sides. It is our faculty of fancy that fills the disquieting gaps of the unknown with the tranquilizing certitudes of myth and superstition, that points to magic and witchcraft when common sense and reason fail to unveil causality. But that selfsame faculty is also what leads us to rise above accepted facts, above the limits of the possible established by custom and convention, and reach for new summits on the degree of courage, determined by some incalculable combination of nature, culture, and character. ~ Maria Popova

Trees that, like the poplar, lift upward all their boughs, give no shade and no shelter, whatever their height. Trees the most lovingly shelter and shade us, when, like the willow, the higher soar their summits, the lower drop their boughs. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

The birds sang in the dust
in an elaborate weave, ambiguous,
deafening, prey to existence
poor passions lost between the modest
summits of groves of mulberry and elder;
and I, like them, in secluded places
reserved for the lost and pure,
would wait for evening to fall,
for the silent smells of fire
and joyous misery to fill the air,
for the Angelus bell to toll, veiled
in the new peasant mystery
fulfilled in the ancient mystery. ~ Pier Paolo Pasolini

Joy must be one of the pivots of our life. It is the token of a generous personality. Sometimes it is also a mantle that clothes a life of sacrifice and self-giving. A person who has this gift often reaches high summits. He or she is like sun in a community. ~ Mother Teresa

Continental Drift

you have moved through
like an ice flow-
steady slow substantial

tumble of glacial tongue
sweeping through
valleys reshaped

you arrived on your own epic time
patient and thorough
meltwater firn crevasse and all

lifting rocks on shifting plates
smoothing edges
and moving the very axes of my teeth

you soothed over rifts and fault lines
leaving me
newly minted

peaked and ridged
steep and crested
sloped and spurred

Hillsides lush
and summits glistening
I rush to a new dawn

but not without raw traces
of your tender era
scratched warmly on my every acre ~ Nancy Boutilier

You can never feel the real power of the mountains until you start climbing their summits! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Capes are the poetic points of continents. They are the summits of our sailing souls. ~ Kaci Cronkhite

On the summits of these heights I found shells such as are picked up at the seaside. The Indians accounted for their appearance there by saying that once a great sea rolled over the face of the country and only one man in a boat escaped with his family. He had sailed about in the boat until the waters retired to their place, and, living there, became the father of all Indians. ~ Fanny Kelly

I don't think more mega-summits is the way to secure effective implementation. ~ Anders Fogh Rasmussen

In Madame Bovary Flaubert never allows anything to go on too long; he can suggest years of boredom in a paragraph, capture the essence of a character in a single conversational exchange, or show us the gulf between his soulful heroine and her dull-witted husband in a sentence (and one that, moreover, presages all Emma's later experience of men). ( ... ) This is one of the summits of prose art, and not to know such a masterpiece is to live a diminished life. ~ Michael Dirda

Is a pale desert of gigantic water-lilies. They sigh one unto the other in that solitude. And stretch towards the heaven their long and ghastly necks. And nod to and fro their everlasting heads. And there is an indistinct murmur which cometh out from among them like the rushing of subterrene water. And they sigh unto the other ... And the tall primeval trees rock eternally hither and thither with a crashing and mighty sound. And from their high summits, one by one, drop everlasting dews. And at the roots strange poisonous flowers lie writhing in perturbed slumber. And overhead, with a rustling loud noise, the gray clouds rush westwardly forever, until they roll, a cataract, over the fiery wall of the horizon ... ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Life is like topography, Hobbes. There are summits of happiness and success, flat stretches of boring routine and valleys of frustration and failure. ~ Bill Watterson

Of course there are collaborations. But in official meetings with Western diplomats from the US and the European Union, the major issues of our relationships are simply not discussed. The topics are on climate change or any other issues they want us to agree with them on. But they never discuss how we could develop an equal relationship. They should stop using pompous orchestrated summits and begin a serious dialogue with small meetings. ~ Yoweri Museveni

The Sea Still Sounds
(Già da più notti s'ode ancora il mare)
Even more so at night the sea still sounds,
Lightly, up and down, along the smooth sands.
Echo of an enclosed voice in the mind,
that returns in time; and also that
assiduous lament of the gulls; birds
perhaps of the summits that April
drives towards the plain; already
you are near to me in that voice;
and I wish there might yet come to you
from me, an echo of memory,
like this dark murmur of the sea. ~ Salvatore Quasimodo

Before climbing the summits, you must first walk in the down valleys! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Great men are rarely isolated mountain peaks; they are the summits of ranges. ~ Thomas W. Higginson

The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors.
They all need to go on safari together. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

what summits would I not reach if my own life made the subject of the melody. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Resolve, and thou art free. But breathe the air
Of mountains, and their unapproachable summits
Will lift thee to the level of themselves. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A healthy Christian life cannot be stitched together from a series of disjointed mountain-top experiences. We need a Christian spirituality that endures the shadowy, low-lying valleys and the rocky slopes in between all those glorious summits. ~ Andrew Byers

The highest summits and those elevated above the level of other things are mostly blasted by envy as by a thunderbolt. ~ Lucretius

Soon the air of the high place was blowing in through the gaps in the masonry, the open bays, where the wind flowed like water round the arches of a bridge. Borluut felt refreshed fanned by this sea-breeze coming from the beaches of the sky: It seemed to be sweeping up dead leaves inside him. New paths, leading elsewhere, appeared in his soul; fresh clearings
were revealed. Finally he found himself.

Total oblivion as a prelude to taking possession of one's self! He was like the first man on the first day to whom nothing has yet happened. The delights of metamorphosis. He owed them to the tall tower, to the summit he had gained where the battlemented platform was ready for him, a refuge in the infinite.

From that height he could no longer see the world, he no longer understood it. Yes, each time he was seized with vertigo, with a desire to lose his footing, to throw himself off, but not towards the ground, into the abyss with its spirals of belfries and roofs over the depths of the town below. It was the abyss above of which he felt the pull.

He was more and more bewildered.

Everything was becoming blurred - before his eyes, inside his head - because of the fierce wind, the boundless space with nothing to hold on to, the clouds he had come too close to, which long continued to journey on inside him. The delights of sojourning among the summits have their price. ~ Georges Rodenbach

Oh land of farms and green hills mild
Once formed by giants rough and wild
With massive paws they gripped and tore
With one great rip they formed the shore
Where heavy boots left prints so deep
Blue lakes remain 'tween summits steep
The giants fought beneath our skies
And from their bones our mountains rise ~ Shannon Hale

Doth not all nature around me praise God? If I were silent, I should be an exception to the universe. Doth not the thunder praise Him as it rolls like drums in the march of the God of armies? Do not the mountains praise Him when the woods upon their summits wave in adoration? Doth not the lightning write His name in letters of fire? Hath not the whole earth a voice? And shall I, can I, silent be? ~ Charles Spurgeon

There have been summits of civilization at which heretics like Socrates , who was killed because he was wiser than his neighbors, have not been tortured, but ordered to kill themselves in the most painless manner known to their judges. But from that summit there was a speedy relapse into our present savagery. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Living a life is much like climbing mountains-the summits are always further off than you think, but when a man has a goal, he always feels he's working toward something. ~ Louis L'Amour

Look at us, Lazarus, and share our joy. Is there anything stronger than love?"

And Lazarus looked. And for the rest of their life they kept on loving each other, but their passion grew gloomy and joyless, like those funeral cypresses whose roots feed on the decay of the graves and whose black summits in a still evening hour seek in vain to reach the sky. Thrown by the unknown forces of life into each other's embraces, they mingled tears with kisses, voluptuous pleasures with pain, and they felt themselves doubly slaves, obedient slaves to life, and patient servants of the silent Nothingness. Ever united, ever severed, they blazed like sparks and like sparks lost themselves in the boundless Dark. ~ Leonid Andreyev

To see the big picture, get out of the dark valleys, climb to the sunny summits! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I am as one
Who doth attempt some lofty mountain's height,
And having gained what to the upcast eye
The summit's point appear'd, astonished sees
Its cloudy top, majestic and enlarged,
Towering aloft, as distant as before. ~ Joanna Baillie

Know the best thing about being dismissed as an insatiable whore? People don't mind their tongues around you. I've learned more information eavesdropping while I was mid-orgy than I have from spying on G7 summits, but that's off topic. ~ Jeaniene Frost

Haven't I told you scores of times, that you're always beginners, and the greatest satisfaction was not in being at the top, but in getting there, in the enjoyment you get out of scaling the heights? That's something you don't understand, and can't understand until you've gone through it yourself. You're still at the state of unlimited illusions, when a good, strong pair of legs makes the hardest road look short, and you've such a mighty appetite for glory that the tiniest crumb of success tastes delightfully sweet. You're prepared for a feast, you're going to satisfy your ambition at last, you feel it's within reach and you don't care if you give the skin off your back to get it! And then, the heights are scaled, the summits reached, and you've got to stay there. That's when the torture begins; you've drunk your excitement to the dregs and found it all too short and even rather bitter, and you wonder whether it was really worth the struggle. From that point there is no more unknown to explore, no new sensations to experience. Pride has had its brief portion of celebrity; you know that your best has been given and you're surprised it hasn't brought a keener sense of satisfaction. From that moment the horizon starts to empty of all hopes that once attracted you towards it. There's nothing to look forward to but death. But in spite of that you cling on, you don't want to feel you're played out, you persist in trying to produce something, like old men persist in trying to make l ~ Emile Zola

Soon, the sums pledged at the Koch donor summits began to soar from the $13 million that Sean Noble raised in June 2009 to nearly $900 million at a single fund-raising session in the years that followed. "This Supreme Court decision essentially gave a Good Housekeeping seal of approval," acknowledged Steven Law, president of American Crossroads, the conservative super PAC formed by the Republican political operative Karl Rove soon after the Citizens United decision. ~ Jane Mayer

I have known not a few men who, after reaching the summits of business success, found themselves miserable on attaining retirement age. They were so exclusively engrossed in their day to day affairs that they had no time for friend making. ~ B.C. Forbes

Man little knows what calamities are beyond his patience to bear till he tries them; as in ascending the heights of ambition, which look bright from below, every step we rise shows us some new and gloomy prospect of hidden disappointment; so in our descent from the summits of pleasure, though the vale of misery below may appear, at first, dark and gloomy, yet the busy mind, still attentive to its own amusement, finds, as we descend, something to flatter and to please. Still as we approach, the darkest objects appear to brighten, and the mortal eye becomes adapted to its gloomy situation. ~ Oliver Goldsmith

Happiness is the struggle towards a summit and, when it is attained, it is happiness to glimpse new summits on the other side. ~ Fridtjof Nansen

But the summits of poetry are mysteries; they are shiftingly veiled, and those who catch the glimpses see different aspects of the transcendental; but they have seen something, and they come down with the glory lingering on them. ~ Ruth Pitter

Mother of light! how fairly dost thou go Over those hoary crests, divinely led! Art thou that huntress of the silver bow Fabled of old? Or rather dost thou tread Those cloudy summits thence to gaze below, Like the wild chamois from her Alpine snow, Where hunters never climbed
secure from dread? ~ Thomas Hood

The paths to mountain peaks are ever rugged, but men reach the summits. ~ Percy James Brebner

Birds will be bored
If I'd forgotten something
Ring the bells of those school dismissals in the sea
What we shall call pensive borage
We start by giving the solution to the contest
To wit how many tears can be held in a woman's hand
1. as little as possible
2. in a medium-sized hand
While I crumple this star-lit paper
And while the everlasting flesh has once and for all taken
possession of the mountain summits
I live like a recluse in a little house in the Vaucluse
Heart king's order ~ Andre Breton

President Obama hosted lawmakers Thursday saying he wanted bipartisan input on health care reform. Nobody's mind was changed. At the summit's end he threatened to go with the nuclear option, showing he's tougher on Republicans than he is on Iran. ~ Argus Hamilton

Mountains are cathedrals: grand and pure, the houses of my religion. I go to them as humans go to worship ... From their lofty summits, I view my past, dream of the future, and with unusual acuity I am allowed to experience the present moment. My strength renewed, my vision cleared, in the mountains I celebrate creation. On each journey I am reborn. ~ Anatoli Boukreev

All the while Martin attempted to catch his aunt with a remorseful gaze, but the young woman was reabsorbed into her mother's orbit, and though Anna embraced him, pressed on him the importance of visiting soon, he could feel that she was already very far away, not really seeing him, but cruising with distant eyes and a feather's touch over the summits of all her disappointments. ~ Carola Perla

Asked them if they supposed a nation of people ever existed, who, with a free vote in every man's hand, would elect that a single family and its descendants should reign over it forever, whether gifted or boobies, to the exclusion of all other families - including the voter's; and would also elect that a certain hundred families should be raised to dizzy summits of rank, and clothed on with offensive transmissible glories and privileges to the exclusion of the rest of the nation's families - including his own . They all looked unhit, and said they didn't know; that they had never thought about it before, and it hadn't ever occurred to them that a nation could be so situated that every man could have a say in the government. ~ Mark Twain

No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but one, no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides me; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of it surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garland crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud wrack; I can feel the woodland solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.
-MARK TWAIN in an 1889 Dinner Speech at Delmonico's in New York to honor two baseball teams that had just returned from touring the Pacific, including Honolulu. ~ John Richard Stephens

Be patient, my friends; time rolls rapidly away; our longing has its end. The hour will strike, who knows how soon?- when the maternal lap of everlasting Love shall be opened to us, and the full peace of God breathe around us from the palmy summits of Eden. ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Krummacher

It's no use crying over spilt summits. ~ Harold Macmillan

Have you remembrances, the glimmering arches that span the summits of the mind? ~ Kahlil Gibran

Have you ever sailed across an ocean, Donald? On a sail boat surrounded by sea with no land in sight. Without even the possibility of sighting land for days to come. To stand at the helm of your destiny. I want that, one more time. I want to be in the Piazza Del Campo in Sienna. To feel the surge as ten race horses go thundering by. I want another meal in Paris, at L'Ambroisie in the Place Des Vosges. I want another bottle of wine. And then another. I want the warmth of a women in the cool set of sheets. One more night of jazz at the Vanguard. I want to stand on summits and smoke cubans and feel the sun on my face for as long as I can. Walk on the wall again. Climb the tower. Ride the river. Stare at the frescoes. I want to sit in the garden and read one more good book. Most of all I want to sleep. I want to sleep like I slept when I was a boy. Give me that. Just one time. ~ Anonymous

Safety lies in tending towards our highest and not in resting content with an inferior potentiality ... To rest in or follow after an inferior potentiality may seem safe, rational, comfortable, easy, but it ends badly, in some futility or in a mere circling down the abyss or in a stagnant morass. Our right and natural road is towards the summits. ~ Sri Aurobindo

Each year, it is necessary to respire, to take breath again, to revive ourselves at the great living sources that forever keep their eternal freshness. Where can we find them if not at the cradle of our race, on the sacred summits from where descend the Indus and the Ganges ... ? ~ Jules Michelet

I know now that what countries do at summits has the power to help girls in Pakistan, Nigeria or Afghanistan. ~ Malala Yousafzai

It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. ... We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them. ~ Henry David Thoreau

As one whose genius has been duly certified by several dozen learned biographers, I think I may say a word or two on the topic of intellectual summits; which is simply that clarity of thought is a shining point in a vast expanse of unrelieved darkness. Genius is not so much a light as it is a constant awareness of the surrounding gloom, and its typical cowardice is to bathe in its own glow and avoid, as much as possible, looking out beyond its boundary. ~ Stanislaw Lem