For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
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Chapter 24 (p. 430)Carl Sagan
“I can imagine nothing more terrifying than an Eternity filled with men who were all the same. The only thing which has made life bearable…has been the diversity of creatures on the surface of the globe.”
T. H. (Terence Hanbury) White
Captain Hall expressed some doubts as to my views respecting the affection and love of pigeons, as if I made it human, and raised the possessors quite above the brutes. I presume the love of the mothers for their young is much the same as the love of woman for her offspring. There is but one kind of love; God is love, and all his creatures derive theirs from his; only it is modified by the different degrees of intelligence in different beings and creatures.
John James Audubon
The only current happiness is indifference, the only current feelings are the very small ones, the only current thoughts are smaller still. The only beautiful things are small feelings. Commons sense is never beautiful. People can never understand that the only thing which makes the small dogs' position at all bearable is that the big dogs' reason can analyse it.
Stig Dagerman
Small creatures die because
larger creatures are hungry.
How superior to this
human confusion of greed
and creed, blood and fire.Wendell Berry
The divergent scales of values scream in discordance, they dazzle and daze us, and in order that it might not be painful we steer clear of all other values, as though from insanity, as though from illusion, and we confidently judge the whole world according to our own home values. Which is why we take for the greater, more painful and less bearable disaster not that which is in fact greater, more painful and less bearable, but that which lies closest to us. Everything which is further away, which does not threaten this very day to invade our threshold — with all its groans, its stifled cries, its destroyed lives, even if it involves millions of victims — this we consider on the whole to be perfectly bearable and of tolerable proportions.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Sagan, Carl
Sagan, Francoise
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