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Without fear and illness, I could never have accomplished all I
have.
Edvard Munch

LXVIII



Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,

When beauty lived and died as flowers do now,

Before these bastard signs of fair were born,

Or durst inhabit on a living brow;

Before the golden tresses of the dead,

The right of sepulchres, were shorn away,

To live a second life on second head;

Ere beauty\'s dead fleece made another gay: 

In him those holy antique hours are seen,

Without all ornament, itself and true,

Making no summer of another\'s green,

Robbing no old to dress his beauty new;

  And him as for a map doth Nature store,

  To show false Art what beauty was of yore.

 	--William Shakespeare

CXXIX



The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action: and till action, lust

Is perjur\'d, murderous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;

Enjoy\'d no sooner but despised straight;

Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,

Past reason hated, as a swallow\'d bait,

On purpose laid to make the taker mad:

Mad in pursuit and in possession so;

Had, having, and in quest, to have extreme;

A bliss in proof,-- and prov\'d, a very woe;

Before, a joy propos\'d; behind a dream.

  All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

  To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

 	--William Shakespeare

No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as \'what a man does with his
solitude.\'
C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory