Gints Dreimanis

“The nocturnal glory of being great without being
anything! The sombre majesty of splendours no one
knows… And I suddenly experience the sublime feeling
of a monk in the wilderness or of a hermit in his retreat,
acquainted with the substance of Christ in the sands and
in the caves of withdrawal from the world.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“But human power is considerably limited and infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes, and therefore we do not have an absolute power of adapting things which are outside us for our use. But we shall bear with equanimity those things which happen to us contrary to that which a regard for our advantage postulates, if we are conscious that we have done that which we ought, and that we could not have extended the power we have to such an extent as to avoid those things, and moreover, that we are part of nature as a whole, whose order we follow. If we understand this clearly and distinctly, that part of us which is defined by our understanding, that is, the best part of us, will be wholly contented, and will endeavour to persist in that contentment. For in so far as we understand, we can desire nothing save that which is necessary, nor can we absolutely be contented with anything save what is true: and therefore in so far as we understand this rightly, the endeavour of the best part of us agrees with the order of the whole of nature.”
― Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

“On a knoll in the marshes stand the ruins of an old croft-house.

This knoll is perhaps only in a certain sense the work of nature; perhaps it is much rather the work of long dead peasants who built their homes there on the grassy bank by the brook, generation after generation, one on the other’s ruins.”
― Halldór Laxness, Independent People

“An exploding nuclear bomb has a much higher power density than the sun because it is an unsustainable out-of-control flow of energy. A one-megaton nuclear bomb will release 1017 ergs, which is a lot of power. But the total lifetime of that explosion is only a hyperblink of 10-6 seconds. So if you “amortized” a nuclear blast so that it spent its energy over a full second instead of microseconds, its power density would be reduced to only 1011 ergs per second per gram, which is about the intensity of a laptop computer chip. Energywise, a Pentium chip may be better thought of as a very slow nuclear explosion.”
― Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants