What remains to be done must be done by you; since in order not to deprive us of our free will and such share of glory as belongs to us, God will not do everything himself. ― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince. (Dante University of America Press; 2nd edition, May 15, 2003) Advertisements
The demon that you can swallow gives you it’s power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply. — Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth. (Anchor June 1, 1991) Originally published 1988.
To perceive a landscape is therefore to carry out an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image, stored in the mind, as of engaging perceptually with an environment that is itself pregnant with the past. — Tim Ingold, from “The Temporality of the Landscape,” World… Continue reading Tim Ingold
There is within me a thing that is aching, aching, aching always as the days pass. — Mary MacLane, I Await The Devil’s Coming. (Melville House; Reprint edition, March 19, 2013) Originally published April 26th 1902.
We are all stardust. ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos. (Random House; 1 edition, May 7, 2002)
But there is a third mode of trancendence: in it language simply ceases, and the motion of spirit gives no further outward manifestation of its being. The poet enters into silence. Here the word borders not on radiance or music, but on night. — George Steiner, from “Silence and the Poet,” Language and Silence: Essays… Continue reading George Steiner
–luring me to a past that never was. This is the treachery of nostalgia. — Natasha Trethewey, from “Siren” in “Mythology,” Thrall: Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012)
