Philip

“In tortures of dire coldness now a Lake of waters deep
Sweeps over thee freezing to solid still thou sitst closd up
In that transparent rock as if in joy of thy bright prison
Till overburdend with its own weight drawn out thro immensity
With a crash breaking across the horrible mass comes down
Thundring & hail & frozen iron haild from the Element
Rends thy white hair yet thou dost fixd obdurate brooding sit
Writing thy books. Anon a cloud filld with a waste of snows
Covers thee still obdurate still resolvd & writing still
Tho rocks roll oer thee tho floods pour tho winds black as the Sea
Cut thee in gashes tho the blood pours down around thy ankles
Freezing thy feet to the hard rock still thy pen obdurate
Traces the wonders of Futurity in horrible fear of the future”
― William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose

“The first step I say awed me and pleas'd me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Man asks himself: what is this solitary thing that remains to me—my life, my disillusioned life? How has it come to being nothing but this? And the answer is the discovery of man's trajectory, of the dialectical series of his experiences, which, I repeat, though it might have been different, has been what it has been, and which must be known because it is...the transcendent reality.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, History as a System and other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History

“And Urizen gave life & sense by his immortal power
To all his Engines of deceit that linked chains might run
Thro ranks of war spontaneous & that hooks & boring screws
Might act according to their forms by innate cruelty
He also formed harsh instruments of sound
To grate the soul into destruction or to inflame with fury
The spirits of life to pervert all the faculties of sense
Into their own destruction if perhaps he might avert
His own despair even at the cost of every thing that breaths”
― William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose