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Severian

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“Oh, you wretches who feel all this, who, even as I,
cannot allow yourselves to speak of man’s being
here for a purpose, who, even as I, are so utterly
in the clutch of the Nothing that governs us, so
profoundly aware that we are born for nothing,
that we love a nothing, believe in nothing, work
ourselves to death for nothing only that little by
little we may pass over into nothing – how can I
help it if your knees collapse when you think of it
seriously? Many a time have I, too, sunk into these
bottomless thoughts, and cried out: Why do you lay
the axe to my root, pitiless spirit? – and still I am
here.”
― Friedrich HölderlinHölderlin , Hyperion / Empedokles

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“You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer, and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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“For Ibn ’Arabi, whose most beloved teacher Abu Madyan was identified as being the stone, the continual revelation of God’s word is a living, breathing creation. Those highest saints, who are known as the malamatiyya, the blameworthy of this world, the ‘hidden’ or kafirun of God are the embodiment of all the systems of concealment and disclosure, jafr, ta’wil, taqqiyah, et al. The Qur’an is not just a book, it is a person. The texts of al-Kimia are not simple words which when put together produce magical formulas, they are alive.”
― John Eberly, Al-Kimia: The Mystical Islamic Essence of the Sacred Art of Alchemy

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“Again and again and again. A transmutation is required to effect the spiritualization of matter. Whenever living beings disappear, they leave behind a subtle essence, or ‘body’, which in esoteric Islam is called the jism mithali. Solve et coagula, dissolve and coalesce, in other words, ‘to make of the body a spirit and of the spirit a body.’ This is the basis of al-Kimia, nothing more simple can define the term. One and one do not make two, the One divides and multiplies, yet remains One. There is nothing lost by dying; spirit and matter constantly transmute in form and formlessness”
― John Eberly, Al-Kimia: The Mystical Islamic Essence of the Sacred Art of Alchemy

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“How shall I put it? Beauty-yes, beauty is like a decayed tooth. It rubs against one's tongue, it hangs there, hurting one, insisting on its own existence, finally it gets so that one cannot stand the pain and one goes to the dentist to have the tooth extracted, Then, as one looks at the small, dirty, brown, blood-stained tooth lying in one's hand, one's thoughts are likely to be as follows: ‘Is this it? Is this all it was? That thing which caused me so much pain, which made me constantly fret about its existence, which was stubbornly rooted within me, is now merely a dead object. But is this thing really the,same as that thing? If this originally belonged to my outer existence, why-through what sort of providence-did it become attached to my inner existence and succeed in causing me so much pain? What was the basis of this creature's existence? Was the basis within me? Or was it within this creature itself? Yet this creature which has been pulled out of my mouth and which now lies in my hand is something utterly different. Surely it cannot be that?”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

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