Cosmicism Quotes

“Is the beauty of the Whole really enhanced by our agony? And is the Whole really beautiful? And what is beauty? Throughout all his existence man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres, and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he can never be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard. Inevitably so, for if it exists, it is not for him in his littleness. But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man.”
― Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men

“Existential dread to philosophy’s end in an objectively indignant and unknowable universe is principally all we shall ever expect to bear and intuit but more importantly were intended to observe in dull harmonious respite, the congenital lack of a resolving creation myth or prime reason to exist, for anything to survive and billions of years lay dormant for the incidental arrival of our brains unwillingly limited to these strictures that were already set for us by the dawning of contumacious evolution without cause but local expedience, no matter the latest surge of scientific ingenuity or imagined promise in our comprehension of the universe’s layered and aimless design by scoping the hanging stars gripped by a listless Milky Way within speculative aeons of unshored blackness, only a dubious reasoning to our being ever spun and plied from the remaining equally unknowable shunted gaze of the cosmos.”
― Jacob H. Kyle, The Tedium Lies

“Why should I care if I have a cold?
If my editor’s check is late again?
If my aunt has gone for a visit and left no food in the house?

An asteroid will strike the Earth and boil its life away.
The dying Sun will swell and grow, devouring its planets.
The Galaxy will collapse into a dimensionless Black Hole.”
― Gary Myers

“I am the Planet eremite, the giant repulsor
of the light
That falls like icy rain at night, from frigid stars
and moons a-cold.
Ye hath not seen a world like this - the blank
and oceanless abyss,
The nameless pit and precipice, the mountain
very bleak and old.
Yet ah - my silence murmureth! Oh, Inner Orbs,
ye have not heard
That stillness where there is no death, because
no life hath ever stirred!
'But here God's very name is dead!' wept Heaven's
mighty Myriarch.
Then trembling turned away and fled, for Some-
thing gibbered in the dark!”
― Stanley G. Weinbaum, The New Adam

“We are all of us lost in the vast and endless night that is ourselves. We wander, hopelessly and eternally abandoned, through our own secret chambers of hell. Just as shadows are devoured by the night so our souls cry out for their source.”
― Mark Samuels, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales

“How far does reality extend? That’s the question I keep asking myself.
Across billions of light-years to the mysterious point where the cosmos curves back on itself and the laws of time and space cease to apply? Only just as far as that visible universe mankind can detect and analyse with his instruments? Or is it confined solely within the limits of the skull of each and every isolated person who asks the question?
I think back to the half-ruined temple and its cryptic banners riddled with mandalas. A temple hidden high up on the mountain peak above the jungles of Chang-Yi province, right in the middle of the outland where wreathes the crimson fog and wherein dwell all the fiends with their rites of silent horror.”
― Mark Samuels, The Prozess Manifestations

“Consciousness seemed to mingle with dreams. The two states were becoming one, and I saw visions of some hellish ecstasy. […] And I could not help being reminded of the notion that what we term sanity is only a measure of success in concealing underlying madness.”
― Mark Samuels, The Age of Decayed Futurity: The Best of Mark Samuels

“Brother of mine, tainted by my adoration, your breath is cosmic mistral that speaks the poison of Baudelaire, and I imbibe the alchemy. My star-brimmed eyes leak tears for you, beautiful and lonesome eidolon, my phantom-double; creature of desire and dismay.”
― W.H. Pugmire, An Ecstasy of Fear

“They call to you with dreaming, from their sunken cities or their pits of cosmic void. They drink your lunacies and fears.”
― W.H. Pugmire, An Ecstasy of Fear

“We are the children of the valley. Borne of its magick, we must at some time return to its substance.”
― W.H. Pugmire, Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror