Julian

“One may ask whether scientific instruments like the microscope or telescope could truly enlarge these sensory sectors in a way we could 'experience'—yet such gains cannot be interpreted by the senses, cannot be ‘lived’ in any real sense.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Those who believe that God himself, once he became man, could not face the harshness of destiny without a long tremor of anguish, should have understood that the only people who can give the impression of having risen to a higher plane, who seem superior to ordinary human misery, are the people who resort to the aids of illusion, exaltation, fanaticism, to conceal the harshness of destiny from their own eyes. The man who does not wear the armor of the lie cannot experience force without being touched by it to the very soul.

Grace can prevent this touch from corrupting him, but it cannot spare him the wound. Having forgotten it too well, Christian tradition can only rarely recover that simplicity that renders so poignant every sentence in the story of the Passion.”
― Simone Weil, The Iliad, or The Poem of Force

“When we stood thus on the crest of the Marble Cliffs, Brother Otho would often say that this was the meaning of life: reenacting creation in the ephemeral, the way a child at play imitates his father's work. What gives meaning to sowing and procreation, to building and establishing order, to images and poetry, is that the masterwork is reflected in them as in a mirror of multicolored glass that soon shatters.”
― Ernst Junger, On the Marble Cliffs

“The most cautious man and the most carefree, as so often in the war, survived ...”
― Ernst Junger