kingarthur

Somewhere in the world there is defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory. p.44 Merlin

Every man who has ever lived holds tight to the belieft that for him alone the laws of probability are canceled out by love. p.77 The Wedding of King Arthur

In the combat between wisdom and feeling, wisdom never wins...When the time comes, your feeling will conduct you to your fate. p.99 The Death of Merlin

With knowledge there is no hope. p.129 Gawain, Ewain, and Marhalt (kind of the opposite of "ignorance is bliss")

...peace, not war, is the destroyer of men; tranquillity rather than danger is the mother of cowardice, and not need but plenty brings apprehension and unease..the longed-for peace, so bitterly acchieved, created more bitterness than ever did the anguish of acchieving it.
p.207 The Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot of the Lake (I'm not sure how true this is but I know that when those in power generally feel the "peace" of "tranquility" and "plenty" results in the "unease" and "bitterness" in those who are still being overlooked.)

It is one thing to make oneself great but quite another to try to be not small. I think that every man wants to be larger than himself and that he can be only if he is part of something immeasurably larger than himself. p.209-210 The Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot of the Lake

Perhaps it is so with everyone, that he looks for weakness in the strong to find promise of strength in his weakness. p.220 The Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot of the Lake

Four witches try to seduce Sir Lancelot to become their own little toys. Each gives their own argument to why he should stick with them. Each is so poetic and so acurate to assessing the desire in a man's hearts that I really wanted to include each one.
Queen of North Galys: I think you know what I can promise you -- sensations you are only dimly aware of -- ecstasy, mounting, growing, swelling, bursting -- endless and no satiety, no end until you know the crucifixion of love, and screams for the cross, and help to drive the nails while every nerve, every white writhing nerve, joins the demonic and whips itself to a rage of exulting and ragin passion. You like your lips. You think you know. What you know is only a whisper beside the pandemonium I promis you.
Queen of the Outer Isles: Sir Best Knight, I think you wil agree that no state, climate, activity, pleasure, pain, joy, sorrow, defeat, or victory does not with surfeit become tiresome. My gift to you is change. One day will echo with laughter like a rippled blue pool smiling in the sun while wavelets chuckle among mossy stones; the next will mother storm, fierce, wild crashing violence -- mind-torn -- wonderful. I promise that every joy will be emphasized with a little pain, rest will follow riot, heat alternate with cold. Lusts of the flesh and mind will bring cool ascetic healing and shapenings. I promise that no expereinece will blunt itself upon itself. In a word, I will extend your feelings, senses, thoughts, to the outmost limit, so that never will you feel the universal blight of waste, of curiosity unsatisfied, possibilities unexplored. I offer life. You will be king one day and work-ruined serf the next, to give your kingship value. Where others offer one thing, I offer everything set in layers of contrasst. Finally I offer you a proper death, a hight and shining death as the final ornament of a proper high and shining life.
The Queen of Eastland gives a little monologue about giving the comfort a dead mother can provide but it's kind of boring and not very poetic.
Queen Morgan Le Fay: My clever little coven sisters have offered you bright-colored shreds of a whole gament, broken pieces of a holy figure. I offer you the whole of which all else is part -- I offer power. If you want harlotry in fancy dress, power will get it for you. Admiration?--a whole world aches to kiss its backside with slobbering lips. A crown? Power and a little knife will place it on your head. Change? With power you can try on cities like hats, or smash them when you tire of them. Power attracts loyalty and requires none. The will to power keeps a baby suckling grimly long after he is fed, counsels a child to take his brother's toy, reaps a gagglin haverst of concupicent girls. What drives a knight through tortures to his prize or death? The power of fame. Why does a man heap up property he cannot use? Why does a conqueror take countries he will never see? What makes the hermit grovel in the black filth of a cell but the promise of power, or at least influence in heaven? And do the humble mad saints reject the power of interecession? What crime is there that does not become a virtue in the hands of power? And is not virtue itself a kind of power? Philanthropy, good deeds, charity, are they not mortgages on the currency of future power? It is the one possession that does not flag or become tedious, for there is never enough of it and an old man in whom the juice of all other desires are dried up will crawl on his tottering knees toward his grave still grabbing with frantic hands for power.
My sisters have laid out cheese for the mice of small desires. They courted sensations, restlessness, and memory. I do not offer you a gift, but the ability, the right, and the duty to take all gifts, anything you can conceive, and when you weary of it, to smash it like a pot and throw it on the midden heap. Best of all, I offer you power over men and women, over their bodies, their hopes, their fears, their loyalties, and their sins. This is the sweetest power of all. For you can let them run a little and stop them short of heaven with a casual claw. And when your contempt for this nastiness finally sickens you, you can shrivel them in writhing clots the way you'd put salt on a regiment of slugs and see them melt down in their own slime.
My sisters spoke to your senses. I speak to your mind. My gift -- a ladder to climb to the stars, who are your brothers and your peers, and from there to look down and for amusement stir up the anthill of the world. p.236-239 The Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot of the Lake

A face, a body, grows and suffers with its possessor. It has scars and ravages of pain and defeat, but also it has the shining of courage and love. And to me, at least, beauty is a continuation of all of those. p.241 The Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot of the Lake

It is a marvel and a mystery how words grow wings and range the countryside, and no one understands the limitless penetration of a whisper. p.276 The Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot of the Lake

A lie is a good and valuable thing. A wonderful precious thing to hold in reserve. But never use this jewel until you have exhausted the truth. Truth is common stuff, read to your hand, but lies you have to make yourself, and you can't be sure they are any good until you have used them -- and then it's too late. p.283 The Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot of the Lake

Somewhere in the world there is defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory.

Every man who has ever lived holds tight to the belieft that for him alone the laws of probability are canceled out by love. p.77 The Wedding of King Arthur

In the combat between wisdom and feeling, wisdom never wins...When the time comes, your feeling will conduct you to your fate. p.99 The Death of Merlin

With knowledge there is no hope. p.129 Gawain, Ewain, and Marhalt (kind of the opposite of "ignorance is bliss")

...peace, not war, is the destroyer of men; tranquillity rather than danger is the mother of cowardice, and not need but plenty brings apprehension and unease..the longed-for peace, so bitterly acchieved, created more bitterness than ever did the anguish of acchieving it.
p.207 The Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot of the Lake (I'm not sure how true this is but I know that when those in power generally feel the "peace" of "tranquility" and "plenty" results in the "unease" and "bitterness" in those who are still being overlooked.)

It is one thing to make oneself great but quite another to try to be not small. I think that every man wants to be larger than himself and that he can be only if he is part of something immeasurably larger than himself. p.209-210 The Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot of the Lake

Perhaps it is so with everyone, that he looks for weakness in the strong to find promise of strength in his weakness. p.220 The Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot of the Lake

Four witches try to seduce Sir Lancelot to become their own little toys. Each gives their own argument to why he should stick with them. Each is so poetic and so acurate to assessing the desire in a man's hearts that I really wanted to include each one.
Queen of North Galys: I think you know what I can promise you -- sensations you are only dimly aware of -- ecstasy, mounting, growing, swelling, bursting -- endless and no satiety, no end until you know the crucifixion of love, and screams for the cross, and help to drive the nails while every nerve, every white writhing nerve, joins the demonic and whips itself to a rage of exulting and ragin passion. You like your lips. You think you know. What you know is only a whisper beside the pandemonium I promis you.
Queen of the Outer Isles: Sir Best Knight, I think you wil agree that no state, climate, activity, pleasure, pain, joy, sorrow, defeat, or victory does not with surfeit become tiresome. My gift to you is change. One day will echo with laughter like a rippled blue pool smiling in the sun while wavelets chuckle among mossy stones; the next will mother storm, fierce, wild crashing violence -- mind-torn -- wonderful. I promise that every joy will be emphasized with a little pain, rest will follow riot, heat alternate with cold. Lusts of the flesh and mind will bring cool ascetic healing and shapenings. I promise that no expereinece will blunt itself upon itself. In a word, I will extend your feelings, senses, thoughts, to the outmost limit, so that never will you feel the universal blight of waste, of curiosity unsatisfied, possibilities unexplored. I offer life. You will be king one day and work-ruined serf the next, to give your kingship value. Where others offer one thing, I offer everything set in layers of contrasst. Finally I offer you a proper death, a hight and shining death as the final ornament of a proper high and shining life.
The Queen of Eastland gives a little monologue about giving the comfort a dead mother can provide but it's kind of boring and not very poetic.
Queen Morgan Le Fay: My clever little coven sisters have offered you bright-colored shreds of a whole gament, broken pieces of a holy figure. I offer you the whole of which all else is part -- I offer power. If you want harlotry in fancy dress, power will get it for you. Admiration?--a whole world aches to kiss its backside with slobbering lips. A crown? Power and a little knife will place it on your head. Change? With power you can try on cities like hats, or smash them when you tire of them. Power attracts loyalty and requires none. The will to power keeps a baby suckling grimly long after he is fed, counsels a child to take his brother's toy, reaps a gagglin haverst of concupicent girls. What drives a knight through tortures to his prize or death? The power of fame. Why does a man heap up property he cannot use? Why does a conqueror take countries he will never see? What makes the hermit grovel in the black filth of a cell but the promise of power, or at least influence in heaven? And do the humble mad saints reject the power of interecession? What crime is there that does not become a virtue in the hands of power? And is not virtue itself a kind of power? Philanthropy, good deeds, charity, are they not mortgages on the currency of future power? It is the one possession that does not flag or become tedious, for there is never enough of it and an old man in whom the juice of all other desires are dried up will crawl on his tottering knees toward his grave still grabbing with frantic hands for power.
My sisters have laid out cheese for the mice of small desires. They courted sensations, restlessness, and memory. I do not offer you a gift, but the ability, the right, and the duty to take all gifts, anything you can conceive, and when you weary of it, to smash it like a pot and throw it on the midden heap. Best of all, I offer you power over men and women, over their bodies, their hopes, their fears, their loyalties, and their sins. This is the sweetest power of all. For you can let them run a little and stop them short of heaven with a casual claw. And when your contempt for this nastiness finally sickens you, you can shrivel them in writhing clots the way you'd put salt on a regiment of slugs and see them melt down in their own slime.
My sisters spoke to your senses. I speak to your mind. My gift -- a ladder to climb to the stars, who are your brothers and your peers, and from there to look down and for amusement stir up the anthill of the world. p.236-239 The Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot of the Lake

A face, a body, grows and suffers with its possessor. It has scars and ravages of pain and defeat, but also it has the shining of courage and love. And to me, at least, beauty is a continuation of all of those. p.241 The Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot of the Lake

It is a marvel and a mystery how words grow wings and range the countryside, and no one understands the limitless penetration of a whisper. p.276 The Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot of the Lake

A lie is a good and valuable thing. A wonderful precious thing to hold in reserve. But never use this jewel until you have exhausted the truth. Truth is common stuff, read to your hand, but lies you have to make yourself, and you can't be sure they are any good until you have used them -- and then it's too late. p.283 The Noble Tale of Sir Lancelot of the Lake