Circe Link

“OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

“The ensuing heartbreak produces the same result—a feeling of unreality, and the awareness that the pleasures of life and a final understanding of it exist in the act of creation, the sole true life and true reality.”
― Józef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

“What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone in the forest at night.”
― Thomas Merton

“The temple bell stops
But the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers”
― Matsuo Bashō