Perhaps at some point in your life, you may come across a thought, or some choice words from another that will have a profound & unsettling effect upon you the very instant they are ingested…echoes from a distant past. Allow me to share mine with all of you.
"I welcome all signs that a more virile & warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all. For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength that this higher age will require one day---the age that will carry heroism into the search for knowledge and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences.
To this end we now need many preparatory, courageous human beings...---human beings who know how to be silent, lonely, resolute, and content and constant in invisible activities;...human beings distinguished as much by cheerfulness, patience, unpretentiousness, and contempt for all great vanities as by magnanimity in victory, and forbearance regarding the small vanities of the vanquished;...human beings...accustomed to command with assurance, but instantly ready to obey when that is called for---equally proud, equally serving their own cause in both cases, more endangered human beings, more fruitful human beings, happier beings! For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is---to live dangerously!”— Jerry Woodruff
“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster . . . when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”