Carl Pyotr

“(Curious in time I stand, noting the efforts of heroes,
Is the deferment long? bitter the slander, poverty, death?
Lies the seed unreck’d for centuries in the ground? lo, to God’s due occasion,
Uprising in the night, it sprouts, it blooms,
And fills the earth with use and beauty.)”
― Walt Whitman, Passage to India

“See ye not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee world-wide from God? Miserable man! Oh! Most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. So disordered, self-condemning is his look, that had there been policemen in those days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested ere he touched a deck.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as is own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Hvis et Menneske eiede et Brev, hvorom han vidste eller troede, at det indeholdt Oplysning om hvad han maatte ansee for sit Livs Salighed, men Skrifttegnene vare fine og blege, Haandskriften næsten ulæselig, da vilde han vel med Angst og Uro, med al Lidenskab læse og atter læse, og i eet Øieblik faae een Mening ud, i det næste en anden, i Forhold til som han, naar han troede med Bestemthed at have læst et Ord, vilde forklare Alt efter dette; men han vilde aldrig komme videre end til den samme Uvished, med hvilken han begyndte. Han vilde stirre, ængsteligere og ængsteligere, men jo mere han stirrede, jo mindre saae han; hans Øie vilde stundom fyldes med Taarer, men jo oftere det hændte ham, jo mindre saae han; i Tidens Løb blev Skriften blegere og utydeligere, tilsidst hensmuldrede Papiret selv, og han beholdt intet Andet tilbage end et taareblændet Øie.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Enten-Eller