Maddy

“One need not possess joys in order to taste their bitterness! Even to view them from afar off begets loathing of them. Thou must be fatigued by the monotony of the same actions, the length of the days, the hideousness of the world, the stupidity of the sun?”
― Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of St. Antony

“Ascend skyward forever and forever,–yet thou wilt not attain the summit. Descend below the earth for billions of billions of centuries: never wilt thou reach the bottom. For there is no summit, there is no bottom; there is no Above, no Below – there is no end.”
― Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of St. Antony

“Inasmuch as existence originates from corruption, corruption from desire, desire from sensation, sensation from contact, I have ever avoided all action, all contact, and perpetually – motionless as the stela of a tomb, exhaling my breath from my two nostrils, fixing my eyes upon my nose, and contemplating the ether in my mind, the world in my members, the moon in my heart – I dreamed of the essence of the great Soul whence continually escape the principles of life, even as sparks escape from fire.
Thus at last I found the supreme Soul in all beings, and all beings in the supreme Soul; and I have been able to make enter in to it mine own soul in which I have enclosed all my senses.”
― Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of St. Antony

“Thy chastity is but a more subtle form of corruption, and thy contempt of this world is but the impotence of thy hatred against it.”
― Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of St. Antony