Various authors

“ By and by the knowledge of where I was dawned on me—in a land as real as our own world and yet but a reflection of it, in the realm of those unseen doubles that thrive upon the marrow of their terrestrial counterparts, that exploit their originals and grow into ever huger shapes, the more the latter eat themselves up in vain hoping and waiting for happiness and joy. ”

“ We ourselves are forms made out of Time—bodies that seem to be matter, but are no more than coagulated Time. And our daily withering away towards the grave—what is it but our returning unto Time again, waiting and hoping being but the symptoms of this process, even as ice on a stove hisses away as it changes back to water again?
"I now saw that, as this knowledge woke in my mind, trembling seized upon my double, and that his face was contorted with terror. Then I knew what I had to do; to fight unto the death with every weapon against those phantoms that suck our life away like vampires. ”

“ One can scarcely imagine anything more dream-like than this tiny little town of Runkel, slumbering away in spite of the screams and cries of Time, like some forgotten relic of the Middle Ages, with its crooked streets and passages, silent as the dead, and grass-grown, rugged cobble-stones, beneath the shadow of the ancient rock-built castle of Runkelstein, the ancestral seat of the Princes of Wied. ”

“ I tell you that whatever we seem to finish on earth ever generates new waiting and hoping. The whole world is pervaded by the pestiferous breath of the decay of a scarcely-born present. Who has not felt the enervating weakness that seizes on one when sitting in the waiting-room of a doctor or lawyer or official? What we call life is the waiting-room of death!
"Suddenly I realized then and there what Time is. ”

“ How else could it be—if shapes were not simply dreams—that we can at will change at any time one body for another, that we should be able to appear among men in a human form, among spectres as a shade and among thoughts as an idea,—all this through the power of the secret of how to divest ourselves of our shape as if it were a toy picked up in a dream? Even as a man who is half asleep, may suddenly become conscious of his dreaming, thereby putting the illusive conception of time into a new present. ”

“ Out of this heart-stableness there streams a sense of beatitude of which you can scarcely dream. It is like a sweet melody that never ceases—this 'I am.' Once born it cannot die—neither in sleep, nor when the outer world wakes our senses for us again, nor even in death. ”

“ I remembered immediately what years ago I had heard my master Count du Ghazal say about an impending catastrophe for mankind; and perhaps this was the reason why I could not get myself to join whole-heartedly in the cursing of the hostile powers by the villagers. Indeed it seemed to me that behind all these events there stood as their real cause the dark influence of certain hateful powers of nature playing with mankind as it were with a marionette.
Magister Wirtzigh remained absolutely unmoved, just like a man who had long foreseen what was to come. ”

“ Within you the waiting still remains alive. You must put the axe to the root. Become as an automaton in this world, as one dead though seemingly alive. Never reach out after a tempting fruit, if there is to be the shortest waiting for it. ”

“ Chrysophron Zagreus to himself, "even as a short time ago spooks came overnight upon the animals, so that horses suddenly could calculate and dogs could read and write. What if he should break forth out of men themselves like unto a flame?"
"Then must we cheat light through light in man," cried Monseigneur du Ghazal. "We must dwell henceforth in their brains as a new false glow of an illusory, sober intelligence until they mistake the moon for the sun. We must teach them to distrust everything that is light." ***** What more his lordship said I cannot remember. ”

“ Steel creepers, with sharp horrid thorns, grow out of the ground, catch legs and tear bodies. In silent glee semaphores wag to one another and again hundreds of thousands of the hateful brood are destroyed. Hidden behind trees and hills giant howitzers lie in ambush, necks outstretched to the sky, with chunks of ore between their teeth, till treacherous wind-mills tap out to them insidious signals to spit forth death and destruction. ”

“ And even as 'to conceive' and 'to create' something is nothing else but to cause one's soul to assume the shape of what one 'seeth' or 'createth' and to unite one's self with it, even so are men henceforth driven helplessly on the way to transforming themselves magically into machines, until at last they will stand here naked as a never slowing-down, ceaselessly pounding, heaving and groaning piece of clock-work—as that which they always wanted to invent—a joyless perpetuum mobile. ”

“ Even their poets, who are superstitiously credited with seers' powers, sing their songs to her with ecstatic sighs and upturned eyes. And not one of them feels his lips grow pale for horror at the thought that for millions and millions of years, month after month, this bloodless cosmic corpse turns round our earth. The very dogs have more sense—especially the black ones! They at least put their tails between their legs and howl when they see the moon!"
"Did you not write me quite recently, Monseigneur and Master, that machines were the direct creatures of the moon?" asked Dr. Haselmayer. ”

“ Oh! they know full well why they remain invisible for man, why they hide themselves from our eyes—those parasites of our life!—even as it is the devil's most foul device to act as if he did not exist. Since then I have for ever rooted out of my life the two ideas of hoping and waiting. ”

“ Thereupon he paused and asked the others in a whisper whether I could be trusted.
"He has long since become a lifeless piece of clock-work in my hands," the Rev. Magister assured him. "Our ritual prescribes that one who has died to this earth, should hold the torch, when we meet in council. He is like a corpse, carries his soul in his hand and believes it is a smouldering lamp." ”

“ Then will there be no more 'importance' and 'unimportance' for you; every event will be equally 'important' and 'unimportant.' You will become 'horned' by drinking the dragon's blood, and be able to say of yourself: I fare forth into the shoreless sea of an unending life with snow-white sails. ”

“ There may be a secret reason in the present war, that the World-spirit wants to keep the people asunder, so that they may stand separate as the limbs of a future body? What does it help me if I do not know the last intention? The influences you cannot see are always the most powerful. ”

“ But the moon, the secret source of earthly shapes, has overcast all for them with a deluding glamour, so that they have run astray into a wrong imagination and projected into outward reality—into the tangible world—what they ought to have contemplated inwardly.
"As a consequence machines have become visible titan-bodies, born out of the brains of degenerate heroes. ”

“ Heart-beat and breath are stilled as in a corpse when the newly rediscovered spirit goes forth,—when we go forth as once did Israel from the fleshpots of Egypt, and the waters of the Red Sea stood as walls on either side. ”

“ Fierce scorn sounded in his words, and a sudden terror paralyzed my blood when I realized that in truth I could not move a limb and had become as rigid as a corpse.
Again the Rev. Dr. Zagreus began to speak: "Nay, the 'Song of Songs' of Hate is aroar through the world. I have seen with my own eyes him who sits upon the yellow horse and behind him in its thousands the army of machines, our friends and allies. Long have they had power of their own, but ever men remain still blind and think themselves masters and lords over them. ”

“ Out of it came thronging a grinning crowd carrying sacks of gold, smacking their puffed lips in greasy contentment—phantoms in fat and jelly of all who waste their lives on earth in the insatiable hunger for a gambler's gains. ”

“ In my imagination I see my grandfather—though I had never known him in the flesh—lying there, untouched by decay, with folded hands, eyes open clear as crystal, motionless; like one who has escaped corruption in the midst of the realm of mould, with silent patience awaiting resurrection. ”

“ And thus he gives another more desirable direction to the off-flow of his dream, as if jumping with both feet at once into a new body, seeing that the body is in reality nothing but a contraction of the all-pervading ether laden with the illusion of tangible solidity. ”

“ Shall I tell you why men now die so early and no longer live for a thousand years as it is written of the patriarchs in the scriptures? They are like the green watery shoots of a tree. They have forgotten that they belong to the trunk, and so they wither away the first autumn. ”

“ I tell you, in the whole world's expanse there is not a single really dead thing."
"But our own sweet home the moon," suavely piped Dr. Haselmayer—"isn't she an extinct astral body; isn't she dead?"
"She is not dead," Monseigneur informed him. "She is but the face of death. ”

“ Then howling, irresistible, amok-running madness explodes, until the lead-storm has nothing to hurt but corpses.
"From West and from East, from America and from Asia, they stream on to the war-dance, the brown monsters, their round mouths filled with murder-lust.
"Steel sharks lurk round the coasts, stifling in their bellies those who have given them life.
"But even the home-stayers, the seemingly lukewarm ones who have been so long neither hot nor cold—those who have previously procreated only tools of peace—are awakened and contribute their share to the great massacre. ”

“ Something invisible is growing and growing, and I cannot find its root.
"I have interpreted the celestial signs which do not deceive. Yes, even the demons of the deep are preparing to fight; and soon the skin of the earth will twitch like that of a horse tormented with flies. ”

“ Of one of those who can say 'I' to every stone, to every flower and to every animal within and without space and time?
"Nothing can be lost, they say. Whose hand then gathers all that enthusiasm which is liberated everywhere like a new power of nature? ”

“ Haselmayer.
"Generally it is, most certainly," politely admitted Monseigneur du Chazal. "But that is surely not the sole reason. In my opinion the essential matter seems to be that man too—taking things as they are—is nothing but a half-finished thing, destined itself one day to become a clock-work. You can see that from the visible fact that already certain by no means unessential instincts of his—e. g. the choosing of a right mate in order to improve the race—have degenerated into automatism. ”

“ I am moved by the hope that what I write down here may meet the eyes of those who know more than I do, and who may enlighten and instruct me, if they can and dare do so, concerning the whole sequence of unsolvable riddles that have followed the course of my life. ”

“ I remain silent and never contradict her, for I know what I know. But when the old lady has left the room, I get up surreptitiously to make sure. I open the Gothic press and convince myself of the reality of everything.
Yes, of course, there stands the snake-lamp and below it there they hang—the green tall hat, the waistcoat and the silk breeches of the Rev. Dr. Haselmayer. ”

“ Not a single one of them wants to lie down and sleep.
"Ever new giant vultures hurry to get fledged, to circle above the last hiding-places of men; and thousands of restless iron spiders run to and fro, to weave shimmering silver-white wings for them." ”

“ Even to-day we might rightly say that machinery has become a worthy twin of the late golden calf. For a man who tortures his child to death, gets no more than a fortnight's prison, while he who damages an old street roller, may be locked up for three years. ”

“ What is the enigmatic power that sweeps away overnight everything small and makes a beggar's heart as wide as an apostle's? I have seen a poor schoolmistress adopt an orphan without any ado—and then fear seized me. ”

“ But always when I would have asked the purport of the sentence on the book-cover that contained my grandsire's papers, he deftly turned the conversation. "How shall a man escape death if not by ceasing to wait and hope?" ”

“ But now they are climbing to the summit of perfection: that means, they admit the reality only of what they can—sell!
"In doing this they expect as a matter of course—for it is written in the fourth commandment 'thou shalt honour thy father and mother'—that the machines they procreate and anoint with the finest oils while they themselves remain content with margarine, will repay them a thousandfold for the pains of production and shower the blessings of every kind of happiness upon them. They only forget completely that machines too may prove ungrateful children. ”

“ We can confidently state that already in the last quarter of the past 19th century mechanics have been quickly and surely gaining an ever increasing ascendancy over mankind. But if things continue at this pace, as we have every right to expect, in the 20th century men will scarcely have time left to catch a glimpse of daylight because of all the trouble of cleaning, polishing, keeping in repair and eventually renewing the many and manifold and always multiplying machines. ”

“ As far as I can think back in memory, I have always had the feeling as though I wore an iron ring round my head, encircling my brain and hindering the development of what is commonly called phantasy. I should say that one of my inner senses is wanting, but in compensation my eyes and ears are as keen as those of a savage. ”