Dear darkening ground,
you've endured so patiently the walls we built,
please give the cities one more hour

and the churches and cloisters two.
And those that labor — let their toils
still hold them for another five hours, or seven,

before that hour of inconceivable terror
when you take back your name
from all things.

Just give me a little more time!
I just need a little more time.
Because I am going to love the things
as no one has thought to love them,
until they're real and worthy of you.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

William James - Sceptics of Faith

We cannot escape the issue [of faith] by remaining sceptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve.  It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home.  Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisevely as if he went and married some one else?  Scepticism, then is not avoidance of option; it is an option of a certain particular kind of risk.  Better risk loss of truth than chance of error - that is your faith veoter's exact position.  He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.  To preach scepticism to us as a duty until 'sufficient evidence' for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in presence of the religious hypothesis that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true...dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear?

William James - "The Will to Believe"

To address the unconditional character of the present moment is to address the nature of my relationships with my parents and family.  To lay aside the screen of judgment and preference in favor of life is to set myself the task of unknotting the threads of fear and desire that have prevented me from unconditionally embracing my family and my family from unconditionally embracing me.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 17

I could never be talked into believing that all a fish knows is hunger and fear.   I have tried to feel nothing but hunger and fear and don't see how a fish could ever grow to six inches if that were all he ever felt.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 19

"Fear comes when all the mysteries are laid open, when what we thought we wanted is attained. It is just at the moment of seeming fulfillment that we sense irrevocable betrayal, like a great wave rising silently behind us."

-Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (pg. 138)