The End of the World quotes

The origin of the world is unknown.

When geological time begins, some short thousand million years ago, the earth is already a globe, in shape if not in surface much as now, whirling around a star little different if at all from our sun today;

a body with its given size and substance, its allotted place and path in heaven. How it came there is unknown.

Knowing nothing, Man has variously and valiantly guessed.

Seven chief guesses jostle for primacy.

Nobody knows. We only know that an end there must one day be.

Whatever had a beginning must have an end.

It is hard to realize and harder to relish:

These dire predictions proved usually right. The old magi knew it long ago, Old Moore knows it now: that few are the days which pass by on this planet without some evil happenings somewhere.

So bank on black; ’tis safe to prophesy ill.

Safe indeed! A giant rent the heavens, and Troy town fell. This one, delivers Aristotle, brought the Achaean earthquake; that one the storm of Corinth.

Apart from those of the cometary ends which are also flaming ends, fire has fair chances of being the element that will conclude us.

Fire is the same word as pure, and many lands and ages have believed in its purifying virtue alike for soul and body.

The impurer the flesh or spirit the purer had the flames to be. For the prostitute, fire of the forest; for this foul world, fire from on high.

Gradually, through long ages, the earth is drying up. Within observable geological time, water has diminished. It is still diminishing. It will go on diminishing. We shall die parched.

Water, and with it life, will one day disappear from the globe.

A usual estimate of the world area lost by water to land is some ten or eleven square miles a year. Take the measure of the seven seas, and find out how long we have.

Before the globe was cool enough for water to appear, organic life did not exist; carbon could not combine to form the plasm. It will not exist when the globe is too cold for water to remain.

An Ark for the Deluge; there’s no Ark against the Drought.

Without water, vegetation must die, and the herbiverous creatures that live on it, and we that live on them both. Surely the people is grass.

Without water, vegetation must die, and the herbiverous creatures that live on it, and we that live on them both.

Surely the people is grass.

Flood certain; drought certain—how far is there paradox? Thus far: that, save the Living Terror, nothing is certain.

He has had children. Under most theories of the world’s origin—nebular, tidal, planetesimal, collisional—he is our parent, ancestor, creator; by him we had life. Under all physical theories of the world’s present, by him we live.

Lucerna Mundi, lantern of the world, by him we see.

He maintains the seas, the lakes and the rivers.

Death nova will be birth nova, as the nebula which gave us life was born itself of death, in the crash and ruin of life preceding. The heavenly colossal catastrophes are death; they are life.

Collision makes; collision kills.

Out of the chance riot of stars came worlds, came living existence, came we. In new chance riot we shall depart. The heavens go crashing and whirling. The universe forms, un-forms, re-forms. The Terror rolls on. What is it? What means it?

Death nova will be birth nova, as the nebula which gave us life was born itself of death, in the crash and ruin of life preceding. The heavenly colossal catastrophes are death; they are life. Collision makes; collision kills.

Out of the chance riot of stars came worlds, came living existence, came we.

In new chance riot we shall depart. The heavens go crashing and whirling. The universe forms, un-forms, re-forms. The Terror rolls on. What is it? What means it? What is my soul in that universe? May God have mercy.

Thousands more followed to watch them, and maybe also … The sun dropped; the stars came out. As earth’s last darkness fell, some shivered; then joined the others in shouting Hallelujah till midnight and the trump of doom. Pandemonium and paroxysm reigned.

Nothing happened. Nothing.

In misery of beaten hope, through the dawn of March 22nd the crowds moved homewards crushed and silent, or weeping.

This adjournment, like all adjournments, like all optimism, in practice discourages action and defeats its own desire.

Time for everything means time for nothing.

Dwell careless. Eat, drink and be merry. You’ve till the year one billion ere you die.

Evolution on the earth, being the other way, is swimming against the tide of the universe; like walking along a corridor train in the opposite direction to its motion, along a travelling ship from prow to stern.

Cosmically considered, life is a perversion.

… He has no direction, or it is the wrong one. The road? It has brought him from Arcadia to Armageddon, and now is shooting to the Abyss.

… small, that either our race or any created or descendent race, will in a future, nigh or far, be either much better able or much worse able than at this present instant of time to affront whatever the earth and terrible heavens have in store.

They decree, and we die.

To an infinite Universe the calorific death might come or might not; to this finite Universe, the Universe that is, in irreversibility of entropy it must.

The Universe shall not die! Space shall be infinite.

That whole cosmos of theirs, which embraces the uttermost nebulae, which sweeps a thousand million times wider than the trillion-mile pitiful corner seen from Mount Wilson, around which light, swiftest of all things, takes one hundred thousand million years to travel, it is but a …

the same cosmos. Suppose thought were different, other than analytic, eclectic; suppose it worked differently, with quite other symbols; suppose it could think something other than thought. Then the world it would build would be another world, leaving elsewhere (or nowhere?) the real world.

Worlds, like wine, take the shape of the bottle they’re poured into. We are the bottles.

The world believed in has no being but in our brain that edifies it; it is an artificial construction made up of arbitrary signs, themselves made up by the narrowly selective machinery of our mind with the raw material supplied by our narrowly selective senses.