Noah Damski

“The idea is a complicated one, as the burden falls to us to differentiate this Divine Darkness from other kinds of darknesses-- that off a "dark night of the soul," the darkness of sin, and so on. "We pray that we may come unto this Darkness which is beyond light, and, without seeing and without knowing, to see and to know that which is above vision and knowledge through the realization that by not seeing and unknowing we attain to true vision and knowledge," Dionysius wrote, as if clarifying the matter. Equally complicated: the idea of agnosia, or unknowing, which is what one ideally finds, or undergoes, or achieves, within this Divine Darkness. Again: this agnosia is not a form of ignorance, but rather a kind of undoing. (As if one knew once, then forgot? But what did one know?)”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“So much is spoken about wasting one’s life. But the only life wasted is the life of one who so lived it, deceived by life’s pleasures or its sorrows, that he never became decisively, eternally, conscious of himself as spirit, as self, or, what is the same, he never became aware- and gained in the deepest sense the impression- that there is a God there and that ‘he’, himself, his self, exists before this God, which infinite gain is never come by except through despair.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition For Upbuilding And Awakening (Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol 19) (v. 19) by Soren Kierkegaard published by Princeton University Press

“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson