Lilli

“The real mystery does not behave mysteriously or secretively; it speaks a secret language, it adumbrates itself by a variety of images which all indicate its true nature. I am not speaking of a secret personally guarded by someone, with a content known to its possessor, but of a mystery, a matter or circumstance which is “secret,” i.e., known only through vague hints but essentially unknown. The real nature of matter was unknown to the alchemist: he knew it only in hints. In seeking to explore it he projected the unconscious into the darkness of matter in order to illuminate it. In order to explain the mystery of matter he projected yet another mystery - his own psychic background -into what was to be explained: Obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius! This procedure was not, of course, intentional; it was an involuntary occurrence.”
― C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

“I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to listen or to think.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

“From the east a spring breeze is touching us,
passing by,
And so in the goblet in the green wine
tiny ripples are formed.
The blossoms stolen by the whirl
are falling to the earth.
My fair girl will be drunken soon
with her blushed cheeks.
Beside the blue pavilion the peach tree -
Do you know, how long it will bloom?
It’s a trembling shine, a dream:
it cheats us and steals away.
Rise and dance!
The sun is fading!
Who never was full of demanding live
and crazy in his young days
will vainly - when the hair
is white - sigh and wail.”
― Li Po

“We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need — but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need — within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness