“O friend, for the morrow let us not worryThis moment we have now, let us not hurryWhen our time comes, we shall not tarryWith seven thousand-year-olds, our burden carry”
“Come and let us live my Deare,Let us love and never feare,What the sowrest Fathers say:Brightest Sol that dies to dayLives againe as blithe to morrow,But if we darke sons of sorrowSet; o then, how long a NightShuts the Eyes of our short light!Then let amorous kisses dwellOn our lips, begin and tellA Thousand, and a Hundred, scoreAn Hundred, and a Thousand more,Till another Thousand smotherThat, and that wipe of another.Thus at last when we have numbredMany a Thousand, many a Hundred;Wee’l confound the reckoning quite,And lose our selves in wild delight:While our joyes so multiply,As shall mocke the envious eye.”
“Let us remember, too, that greatness is not always a matter of the scale of one’s life, but of the quality of one’s life. True greatness is not always tied to the scope of our tasks, but to the quality of how we carry out our tasks whatever they are. In that attitude, let us give our time, ourselves, and our talents to the things that really matter now, things which will still matter a thousand years from now.”
“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”
“The days, the weeks, the years out here shall come back again, and our dead comrades shall then stand up again and march with us, our heads shall be clear, we shall have a purpose, and so we shall march, our dead comrades beside us, the years at the Front behind us:—against whom, against whom?”
“We are ever brutal to those who love and serve us in silence, but the time may come when, for our cruelty, we shall be deserted by these best friends of ours.”