Maximus

“People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going. They can’t know. In one sense of the word it is of course necessary, as the Greek oracle said, to know oneself: that is the first achievement of knowledge. But to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom. The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul? When the son went out to look for his father’s asses, he did not know that a man of God was waiting for him with the very chrism of coronation, and that his own soul was already the soul of a king.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Do you come from Heaven or rise from the abyss, Beauty?”
― Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil / Les Fleurs du Mal

“Humanity looked in awe upon the beauty and the everlasting duration of creation. The exquisite sky flooded with sunlight. The majesty of the dark night lit by celestial torches as the holy planetary powers trace their paths in the heavens in fixed and steady metre - ordering the growth of things with their secret infusions.”
― Hermes Trismegistus, Corpus Hermeticum

“80. What is God? The immutable or unalterable good.
81. What is man? An unchangeable evil.”
― Hermes Trismegistus, Corpus Hermeticum: The Divine Pymander