Pēteris Cedriņš

“In this calm and stupid life,
I never know how I should act.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“There is the subtler music, the clear light
Where time burns back about th'eternal embers.
We are not shut from the thousand heavens:
Lo, there are many gods whom we have seen,
Folk of unearthly fashion, places splendid,
Bulwarks of beryl and of chrysophrase.

Sapphire Benacus, in thy mists and thee
Nature herself's turned metaphysical,
Who can look at that blue and not believe?”
― Ezra pound

“The apprenticeship to passivity—I know nothing more contrary to our habits. (The modern age begins with two hysterics: Don Quixote and Luther.) If we make time, produce and elaborate it, we do so out of our repugnance to the hegemony of essence and to the contemplative submission it presupposes. Taoism seems to me wisdom’s first and last word: yet I resist it, my instincts reject it, as they refuse to endure anything—the heredity of revolt is too much for us. Our disease? Centuries of attention to time, the idolatry of becoming. What recourse to China or India will heal us?”
― Emil Cioran, The Temptation to Exist

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”
― Ezra Pound