(He opens a tome and begins.)
It says: “In the beginning was the Word.”
Already I am stopped. It seems absurd.
The Word does not deserve the highest prize,
I must translate it otherwise
If I am well inspired and not blind.
It says: In the beginning was the Mind.
Ponder that first line, wait and see,
Lest you should write too hastily.
Is mind the all-creating source?
It ought to say: In the beginning there was Force.
Yet something warns me as I grasp the pen,
That my translation must be changed again.
The spirit helps me. Now it is exact.
I write: In the beginning was the Act.

— Goethe, Faust

Das Wort erstirbt schon in der Feder . . .

— Goethe, Faust

MEPHISTOPHELES:

Du bist am Ende — was du bist.

— Goethe, Faust

I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try to catch time by the tail.

This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.

But you have to choose: live or tell.

— Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea

The time has come to prove by deeds that mortals
Have as much dignity as any god,
And not to tremble at that murky cave
Where fantasy condemns itself to dwell
In agony.

— Goethe, Faust
tr. Walter Kaufmann

Each man kills the thing he loves.

— Oscar Wilde

In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.

— Marcel Proust

None of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us – this and nothing else. The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called on us; but we, the masters, were not at home.

— Walter Benjamin

Aber die Sonne duldet kein Weißes
(but the sun will not suffer the white)

Hier bin ich Mensch, hier darf ich’s sein
(Here I am human, may enjoy humanity)

— Goethe, Faust
tr. Walter Kaufmann 

There is no perception that is not full of memories.

— Henri Bergson

FAUST:

I have, alas, studied philosophy,
Jurisprudence and medicine, too,
And, worst of all, theology
With keen endeavor, through and through —
And here I am, for all my lore,
The wretched fool I was before.
Called Master of Arts, and Doctor to boot,
For ten years almost I confute
And up and down, wherever it goes,
I drag my students by the nose —
And see that for all our science and art
We can know nothing. It burns my heart.

— Goethe’s Faust,
trans. Walter Kaufmann

Despite Mormonism’s entrenched homophobia, and Quinn’s unsparing, clear-eyed assessment of Mormonism’s faults, his faith in the religion of Joseph Smith remains undiminished. “I’m a radical believer,” he says, “but I’m still a believer.” He seems to be one of those rare spiritual thinkers, as Annie Dillard puts it, who possess “a sort of anaerobic capacity to batten and thrive on paradox.”

— Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven