Murau

“To attain the satisfactions of the mystic state without having to endure its rigours; to be the ecstatic follower of no god, the mystic or epopt* with no initiation; to pass the days meditating on a paradise you don’t believe in – all of this tastes good to the soul that knows what it means to know nothing.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“As soon as high consciousness is reached, the enjoyment of existence is entwined with pain, frustration, loss, tragedy. Amid the passing of so much beauty, so much heroism, so much daring, Peace is then the intuition of permanence. It keeps vivid the sensitiveness to the tragedy; and it sees the fineness beyond the faded level of surrounding fact. Each tragedy is the disclosure of an ideal: What might have been, and was not; What can be. The tragedy was not in vain.”
― Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

“Life has become the ideology of its own absence.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“Disgusted with being right, with doing what succeeds, with the effectiveness of methods, try something else.”
― Paul Valery