Excerpts from Coming Up for Air by George Orwell

“I wondered why it is that we’re all such bloody fools. Why don’t people, instead of the idiocies they do spend their time on, just walk around looking at things? That pool, for instance-all the stuff that’s in it. Newts, water-snails, water-beetles, caddis-flies, leeches, and God knows how many other things that you can only see with a microscope. The mystery of their lives, down there in the water. You could spend a lifetime watching them, ten lifetimes, and still you wouldn’t have got to the end even of that one pool. And all the while the sort of feeling of wonder, the peculiar flame inside you. It’s the one thing worth having, and we don’t want it.
…
I know it’s a good feeling to have. What’s more, so does everybody else, or nearly everybody. It’s just round the corner all the time, and we know it’s there. Stop firing that machine-gun! Stop chasing whatever you’re chasing! Calm down, get your breath back, let a bit of peace seep into your bones. No use. We don’t do it. Just keep on with the same bloody fooleries.
…
There’s something that’s gone out of us in these twenty years since the war (WWI). It’s a kind of vital juice that we’ve squirted away until there’s nothing left. All this rushing to and fro! Everlasting scramble for a bit of cash. Everlasting din of buses, bombs, radios, telephone bells. Nerves worn all to bits, empty places in our bones where the marrow out to be.”

—	Coming Up for Air by George Orwell, published in 1939.