The path may be long and hard, and he may lose much time in negotiating its boulders, pitfalls, snares, and obstacles. The chances for a quick sprint forward will be few and rare. Nevertheless, he must continue to travel it. He should let no person and no event involving another person turn him from the quest's straight course. Is he to abandon hope and discard an ideal because its realization seems too remote? Is the finest element of human character doomed to acknowledge defeat? For what does it really matter if the ideal is not realizable during his own lifetime? Is not the struggle merely to approach such realization part of a worthwhile way of living? Were these the only considerations, they would be enough to justify his continuance, but they are not. Man's story is a serial one. It proceeds through body after body, birth after birth. But the fact is that once he really absorbs the spirit of this quest he will be unable to desert it for more than an interval, even should he wish to. He will be inexorably driven back to it by mysterious forces within his own psyche, made to re-engage himself in it--however unwillingly--by a deep, silent, recurrent, inner void.
-- Notebooks Category 2: Overview of Practices Involved > Chapter 3 : Uncertainties of Progress > # 25
