| On Laws | |
| Then a lawyer said, "But what of our Laws, master?" | |
| And he answered: | |
| You delight in laying down laws, | |
| Yet you delight more in breaking them. | |
| Like children playing by the ocean who build sand-towers with constancy and then destroy them with laughter. | |
| But while you build your sand-towers the ocean brings more sand to the shore, | |
| And when you destroy them, the ocean laughs with you. | |
| Verily the ocean laughs always with the innocent. | |
| But what of those to whom life is not an ocean, and man-made laws are not sand-towers, | |
| But to whom life is a rock, and the law a chisel with which they would carve it in their own likeness? | |
| What of the cripple who hates dancers? | |
| What of the ox who loves his yoke and deems the elk and deer of the forest stray and vagrant things? | |
| What of the old serpent who cannot shed his skin, and calls all others naked and shameless? | |
| And of him who comes early to the wedding-feast, and when over-fed and tired goes his way saying that all feasts are violation and all feasters law-breakers? | |
| What shall I say of these save that they too stand in the sunlight, but with their backs to the sun? | |
| They see only their shadows, and their shadows are their laws. | |
| And what is the sun to them but a caster of shadows? | |
| And what is it to acknowledge the laws but to stoop down and trace their shadows upon the earth? | |
| But you who walk facing the sun, what images drawn on the earth can hold you? | |
| You who travel with the wind, what weathervane shall direct your course? | |
| What man's law shall bind you if you break your yoke but upon no man's prison door? | |
| What laws shall you fear if you dance but stumble against no man's iron chains? | |
| And who is he that shall bring you to judgment if you tear off your garment yet leave it in no man's path? | |
| People of Orphalese, you can muffle the drum, and you can loosen the strings of the lyre, but who shall command the skylark not to sing? |