This text
will keep you true to your home: “Love not pleasure, love God.” Remember continually this truth: “There is
in man a higher love than love of happiness; he can do without happiness, and
instead thereof find blessedness.” Emma Curtis
Hopkins
"you
are not you--you have no body
,
no blood, no bones, you are but a
thought. I myself have
no existence; I am but a dream--your dream, a
creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this, then you
will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out
of which you made me"
"In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its
limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever—for you will remain a
thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable,
indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set
you free. Dream other dreams, and better!"
"Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago—centuries, ages,
eons, ago!—for you have existed, companionless, through all the
eternities."
"Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe
and its contents were only dreams, visions,
fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all
dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to
make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a
single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it
short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other
children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other
children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice
and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness
multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to
other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them
all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the
responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where
it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness,
invites a poor, abused slave to worship him!" . . .
"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile
insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its
freaks—in a word, that they are a dream,
and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all
present; you should have recognized them earlier."
"It is true, that which I have revealed to you;
there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no
hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a
thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering
forlorn among the empty eternities!" Mark Twain The Mysterious Stranger is the final novel
attempted by the American author Mark Twain. He worked on it periodically from
1897 through 1908. The body of work is a serious social commentary by Twain
addressing his ideas of the Moral Sense and the "damned human race".
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