"From my rotting body,
flowers shall grow
and I am in them
and that is eternity."
- Edvard Munch

 

"[Humanity's] detachment has enabled him to describe, weigh, and measure the processes of nature and to a large extent to control them; but the price he has paid has been the loss of his grasp of any meaning in either nature or himself." - Owen Barfield, "The Rediscovery of Meaning"

 

"Our wealth of facts is not necessarily a wealth of thoughts."- Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man

 

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." - Unknown

 

"The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and though distant, is close to us in spirit - this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden." - Goethe

 

"No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter...than you and I; and all religion...is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination and poetry." - Edgar Allan Poe

 

"The greatest protection is a loving heart. Protecting yourself, you protect others. Protecting others, you protect yourself." - Buddha

 

"The ancient poets animated all objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity; Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began priesthood; Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things. Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast."
- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

 

"The promise of "beauty"- of being desirable- lulls the young woman [Sleeping Beauty] into an existential limbo where everything is measured by the expectation of one who is to come...The kiss that Sleeping Beauty waits for is not that of any Prince, but the embrace of her own being." - Madonna Kolbenschlag, Kiss Sleeping Beauty Goodbye

 

"Rows of houses, all bearing down on me." - Thom Yorke of Radiohead on Street Spirit (fade out)

 

"Man positively needs general ideas and convictions that will give a meaning to his life and will enable him to find a place in the universe. He can stand the most incredible hardships when he is convinced that they make sense; but he is crushed when, on top of all his misfortunes, he has to admit that he is taking part in a "tale told by an idiot." Carl Gustav Jung, Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams.

 

"We inter-breathe with the rainforests, we drink from the oceans. They are part of our own body." - Buddha

 

"When one does not see what one does not see, one does not even see that one is blind." - Paul Veyne

 

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect."- Mark Twain

 

"Life is so hard, how can we be anything but kind?" - Buddha

 

"What disturbs and alarms man are not the things, but his opinions and fancies about the things." - Epictetus

 

"If a man fasten his attention of a single aspect of truth and apply himself to that alone for a long time, the truth becomes distorted and not itself but falsehood." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Alone
by Edgar Allan Poe

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then- in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life- was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

 

 

 

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