Paganism Quotes - Page 2

I love flowers for being flowers, directly.And I love trees for being trees without my thought.

Superior poets say what they really feel. Mediocre poets say what they decide to feel. Inferior poets say what they think they should feel.

Álvaro de Campos

It’s stupid, but it’s human, and that’s how it is.

Álvaro de Campos

Do I believe a thing has limits!? Of course! Nothing exists that doesn’t have limits. Existence means there’s always something else, and so everything has limits. Why is it so hard to conceive that a thing is a thing, and that it isn’t always being some other thing that’s beyond it?”At that moment I felt in my bones not that I was talking to a man, but to another universe. I tried one last time, from another angle, which I felt compelled to consider legitimate.“Look, Caeiro... think about numbers... Where do they end? Take any number — say 34. Past it we have 35, 36, 37, 38 — there can be no end to it. There is no number so big that there is no number larger...““But that’s just numbers,” protested my master Caeiro.And then, looking at me out of his formidable, childlike eyes:“What is 34 in Reality, anyway?

Álvaro de Campos

But what you’re calling poetry is what everything is. It’s not even poetry — it’s seeing. These materialists are blind. You told me they say space is infinite. Where do they see that in space?”And I, disconcerted: “But don’t you think of space as infinite? Can’t you conceive of space as infinite?”“I don’t conceive of anything as being infinite. How could I conceive of anything as being infinite?”“But, man,” I said, “Imagine space. Beyond that space is more space, and beyond that more, and then more, and more... It never ends...““Why?” asked my master Caeiro.

Álvaro de Campos

Nothing at all reminds us of something else when we pay attention to it.Each thing only reminds us of what it isAnd it’s only what nothing else is.The fact that it’s it separates it from every other thing.(Everything’s nothing without another thing that’s not it).

Alberto Caeiro

On a whitely cloudy day I get sad, almost afraid,And I begin to meditate about problems I make up.

Alberto Caeiro

I’d like to have enough time and quietTo think about absolutely nothing,To not ever feel myself living,To only know myself in others’ eyes, reflected.

Alberto Caeiro

Olympus is still a patriarchy. Zeus heads his royal household as jealously as Jehovah rules his harem of dull, harp-playing angels. Both are templates for order on earth, don’t you think?

Cliff James

For the natural polytheist who finds her gods in the rivers and mountains, in the deep-rooted giants looming above the canopy and in the tiny creatures that move beneath them, ecology gives us a glimpse into a kind of living anatomy of the divine, a theology of physical as well as spiritual life. - Alison Leigh Lilly, "Anatomy of a God

John Halstead

For the natural polytheist, whose gods arise in and from the natural material world ... Our gods not only have transcendent eyes and metaphysical hands. They have antlers and feathers, hooves and scales, fangs and horns and wings and fins and claws. They are in the lands we strip for veins of precious ore. They are in the waters we poison. - Alison Leigh Lilly, "Anatomy of a God

John Halstead

I sing to you of many more gods, gods of wind and water, gods of each mineral and the events that created them. I sing to you of the gods of protons, of quarks, of atomic forces binding and holding. I sing to you of the god of the dust that flies off the ice-burned comet, and the god of the spaces in between. I sing to you of the god that twists like a serpent at the center of every sun and is found again coiled within every electron, shared by both and worshiped by each in its own way. I sing to you of the god that collects asteroids together in mockeries of his sister’s solar systems, jealous of his elder sibling’s power. I sing to you of all these, and many, many more." - Lupa, "The Forgotten Gods of Nature

John Halstead

I sing to you of the deities of the Dictyostelidal slime molds, sexless and strange, at once a thousand voices and one song united. I sing to you of hard times when the wood has rotted away and the sun bakes the earth, and while as individuals we die, together we thrive. The divinities ask for sacrifice, the thousand voices demand it. Those who die to give life to the others, who raise up the new generation so that they may spread far and wide—these become a part of that sacred host, their voices immortalized not in cells but in spirit." - Lupa, "The Forgotten Gods of Nature

John Halstead

The heron must be used to people, and yet it never lets you get too close. Draw parallel to it with the width of one of the marsh’s holding ponds between you, and it will duck its head, eyeing you with suspicion, then fly. I cannot approach the heron, certainly could never touch it; I can only look for it, entranced.This is how I understand the divine, and why I continue to seek it in the resolutely non-human world, with which we nonetheless recognize a numinous kinship. Sometimes, it will turn and lock eyes with you, lifting you out of yourself, changing everything. Other times, it will give you the side-eye and swoop away, leaving you longing for retreating beauty. You might not see it every single time you go looking, or where you expect to find it. No matter how common the experience, every time you stumble across mystery, or independent wild being, it is a surprise and a miracle. And every day, you can look." - Sara Amis, "A Daily Heron

John Halstead

the resurgence of the elder gods breaks down the wall of separation between religion and science that has partitioned Western thought since the Enlightenment. The rise of science has taught us things about the Earth, Sun, and Storm that the ancients would have marveled to know. We are in the enviable, irresistible, position of being able to learn, through science, about the very gods themselves." - Steven Posch, "Lost Gods of the Witches: A User’s Guide to Post-Ragnarok Paganism

John Halstead

Now I sense the perfume of flowers like seeing a new thing.I know they smell just as well as I know I existed.They’re things known from the outside.But now I know with my breathing from the back of my head.

Alberto Caeiro

I don’t know what understanding myself is. I don’t look inside.I don’t believe I exist behind myself.

Alberto Caeiro

The river of my village doesn’t make you think about anything.When you’re at its bank you’re only at its bank.

Alberto Caeiro

The sky is an enormous man.

Emanuel Swedenborg

I don’t regret anything I was before because I still am.I only regret not having loved you.Put your hands in mineAnd let’s be quiet, surrounded by life.

Alberto Caeiro

Where once I prayed for forgiveness from a father God who held up huge palms and said “Thou shalt not,” now I find peace with a sister god who takes my open hands in hers and says, “You will.

Betsy Cornwell

To those Romans December twenty-fifth was the birthday of the sun. They wrote that in gold letters in their calendar. Every year about that time, the middle of winter, the sun was born once more and it was going to put an end to the darkness and misery of winter. So they had a great feast, with presents and dolls for everybody, and the best day of all was December twenty-fifth. That feast, they would tell you, was thousands of years old- before Christ was ever heard of.

John G. Jackson

Either paganish unbelief of the truth of that eternal blessedness, and of the truth of the Scripture which doth promise it to us; or, at least, a doubting of our own interest; or most usually most sensible of the latter, and therefore complain most against it, yet I am apt to suspect the former to be the main, radical master-sin, and of greatest force in this business. Oh! If we did but verily believe that the promise of the glory is the word of God, and that God doth truly mean as he speaks, and is fully resolved to make it good; if we did verily believe that there is, indeed, such blessedness prepared for believers as the scripture mentioneth ; sure we should be as impatient of living as we are now fearful of dying, and should think every day a year till our last day should come. We should as hardly refrain from laying violent hands on ourselves, or from the neglecting of the means of our health and life, as we do now from over-much carefulness and seeking of life by unlawful means. . . . Is it possible that we can truly believe that death will remove us fro misery to such glory, and yet be loth to die(465-6)?It appears we are little weary of sinning, when we are so unwilling to be freed by dying(467).

Richard Baxter

It is often said by the critics of Christian origins that certain ritual feasts, processions or dances are really of pagan origin. They might as well say that our legs are of pagan origin. Nobody ever disputed that humanity was human before it was Christian; and no Church manufactured the legs with which men walked or danced, either in a pilgrimage or a ballet. What can really be maintained, so as to carry not a little conviction, is this: that where such a Church has existed it has preserved not only the processions but the dances; not only the cathedral but the carnival. One of the chief claims of Christian civilisation is to have preserved things of pagan origin.

G.K. Chesterton

On the conversion of the European tribes to Christianity the ancient pagan worship was by no means incontinently abandoned. So wholesale had been the conversion of many peoples, whose chiefs or rulers had accepted the new faith on their behalf in a summary manner, that it would be absurd to suppose that any, general acquiescence in the new gospel immediately took place. Indeed, the old beliefs lurked in many neighbourhoods, and even a renaissance of some of them occurred in more than one area. Little by little, however, the Church succeeded in rooting out the public worship of the old pagan deities, but it found it quite impossible to effect an entire reversion of pagan ways, and in the end compromised by exalting the ancient deities to the position of saints in its calendar, either officially, or by usage. In the popular mind, however, these remained as the fairies of woodland and stream, whose worship in a broken-down form still flourished at wayside wells and forest shrines. The Matres, or Mother gods, particularly those of Celtic France and Ireland, the former of which had come to be Romanized, became the bonnes dames of folklore, while the dusii and pilosi, or hairy house-sprites, were so commonly paid tribute that the Church introduced a special question concerning them into its catechism of persons suspected of pagan practice. Nevertheless, the Roman Church, at a somewhat later era, reversed its older and more catholic policy, and sternly set its face against the cultus of paganism in Europe, stigmatizing the several kinds of spirits and derelict gods who were the objects of its worship as demons and devils, whom mankind must eschew with the most pious care if it were to avoid damnation.

Lewis Spence

If I talk about her like she’s a beingIt’s because talking about her I need to use the language of menWhich gives personality to things,And imposes a name on things.

Alberto Caeiro

There is no difference between ancient and modern paganism. Christianity has five gods: three that band together against one who apparently has managed to stand his ground for millennia, and a mother of god who is worshiped at the same level as the other members of the quadrinity

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Yes: I exist inside my body.I’m not carrying the sun and the moon in my pocket.I don’t want to conquer worlds because I slept badly,And I don’t want to eat the world for breakfast because I have a stomach.Indifferent?No: a son of the earth, who, if he jumps, it’s wrong,A moment in the air that’s not for us,And only happy when his feet hit the ground again,Pow! In reality where nothing’s missing!(6/20/1919)

Alberto Caeiro

The portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the doors, and shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty and peace; and now when I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on the rose in the hand of the Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate and precise that it seemed more like a thought than a flower, or at the grey dawn and rapturous faces of my Francesca, I knew all a Christian's ecstasy without his slavery to rule and custom; when I pondered over the antique bronze gods and goddesses, which I had mortgaged my house to buy, I had all a pagan's delight in various beauty and without his terror at sleepless destiny and his labour with many sacrifices; and I had only to go to my bookshelf, where every book was bound in leather, stamped with intricate ornament, and of a carefully chosen colour: Shakespeare in the orange of the glory of the world, Dante in the dull red of his anger, Milton in the blue grey of his formal calm; and I could experience what I would of human passions without their bitterness and without satiety. I had gathered about me all gods because I believed in none, and experienced every pleasure because I gave myself to none, but held myself apart, individual, indissoluble, a mirror of polished steel: I looked in the triumph of this imagination at the birds of Hera, glowing in the firelight as though they were wrought of jewels; and to my mind, for which symbolism was a necessity, they seemed the doorkeepers of my world, shutting out all that was not of as affluent a beauty as their own; and for a moment I thought as I had thought in so many other moments, that it was possible to rob life of every bitterness except the bitterness of death; and then a thought which had followed this thought, time after time, filled me with a passionate sorrow.

W.B. Yeats

What does this think about that?Nothing thinks about anything.Does the earth have consciousness of its stones and plants?If it did, it would be people. . .Why am I worrying about this?If I think about these things,I’ll stop seeing trees and plantsAnd stop seeing the EarthFor only seeing my thoughts...I’ll get unhappy and stay in the dark.And so, without thinking, I have the Earth and the Sky.

Alberto Caeiro

Praise be to God I’m not good,And have the natural egotism of flowersAnd rivers following their bedPreoccupied without knowing itOnly with blooming and flowing.This is the only mission in the World,This—to exist clearly,And to know how to do it without thinking about it.)

Alberto Caeiro

And I find a happiness in the fact of accepting —In the sublimely scientific and difficult fact of accepting the inevitable natural.

Alberto Caeiro

Things don’t have significance: they only have existence.Things are the only hidden meaning of things.

Alberto Caeiro

When I’m depressed, I read Caeiro — he’s my fresh air. I become very calm, content, faithful — yes, I find faith in God, and in the soul’s transcendent living smallness, after reading the poems by that ungodly anti-humanist who goes unsurpassed on earth.

Álvaro de Campos

A kid thinking about fairy tales and believing in fairy talesActs like a sick god, but like a god.Because even though he affirms that what doesn’t exist exists,He knows things exist, that he exists,He knows existing exists and doesn’t explain itself,And he knows there’s no reason at all for anything to exist.He knows being is the point.All he doesn’t know is that thought isn’t the point.(10/1/1917)

Alberto Caeiro

If I die very young, hear this:I was never anything but a kid playing.I was a heathen like the sun and the water,I had the universal religion only people don’t have.I was happy because I didn’t ask for anything at all,Or tried to find anything,And I didn’t find any more explanationThan the word explanation having no meaning at all.

Alberto Caeiro

There’s enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything.

Alberto Caeiro

Those of us who embrace the feminine know its strength.

Betsy Cornwell

Night doesn’t fall for my eyesBut my idea of the night is that it falls for my eyes.Beyond my thinking and having any thoughtsThe night falls concretelyAnd the shining of stars exists like it had weight.

Alberto Caeiro

All beings exist and nothing elseAnd that’s why they’re called beings

Alberto Caeiro

If I could take a bite of the whole worldAnd feel it on my palateI’d be more happy for a minute or so...But I don’t always want to be happy.Sometimes you have to beUnhappy to be natural...Not every day is sunny.When there’s been no rain for a while, you pray for it to come.So I take unhappiness with happinessNaturally, like someone who doesn’t find it strangeThat there are mountains and plainsAnd that there are cliffs and grass...What you need is to be natural and calmIn happiness and in unhappiness,To feel like someone seeing,To think like someone walking,And when it’s time to die, remember the day dies,And the sunset is beautiful, and the endless night is beautiful...That’s how it is and that’s how it should be...

Alberto Caeiro

...I don't believe in Him, and if He does exist, I don't like Him. His type of gods aren't gods who echo how mortals behave. They're gods who are held up as example of perfection to be emulated. They're not gods of the people. They're remote and inaccessible, they demand blind, unthinking obedience from their followers. They're dictators. We Aesir and Vanir, by contrast, are mirrors. Other gods rule. We reflect and magnify. We are you, only more so. We share your flaws and foibles. We are as humanlike as we are divine, and I think we are all the better for that.

James Lovegrove

Even so, I’m somebody.I’m the Discoverer of Nature.I’m the Argonaut of true sensations.I bring a new Universe to the UniverseBecause I bring the Universe to itself.

Alberto Caeiro

We are not on this planet to ask forgiveness of our deities

Scott Cunningham

All the evil in the world comes from us bothering with each other,Wanting to do good, wanting to do evil.Our soul and the sky and the earth are enough for us.To want more is to lose this, and be unhappy.

Alberto Caeiro

The Amorous Shepherd is a fruitless interlude, but those few poems are among the world’s greatest love poems, because they’re love poems about love, not about being poems. The poet loves because he loves, not because love exists.

Álvaro de Campos

Something changed in part of reality — my knees and my hands.What science has knowledge for this?The blind man goes on his way and I don’t make any more gestures.It’s already not the same time, or the same people, or anything the same.This is being real.

Alberto Caeiro

I’m in no hurry: the sun and the moon aren’t, either.Nobody goes faster than the legs they have.If where I want to go is far away, I’m not there in an instant.(6/20/1919)

Alberto Caeiro

I pass and I stay, like the Universe.

Alberto Caeiro

Everything’s different from us. That’s why everything exists.

Alberto Caeiro

A row of trees far away, there on the hillside.But what is it, a row of trees? It’s just trees.Row and the plural trees aren’t things, they’re names.

Alberto Caeiro

If science wants to be truthful,What science is more truthful than the science of things without science?I close my eyes and the hard earth where I’m lyingHas a reality so real even my back feels it.I don’t need reason — I have shoulderblades.

Alberto Caeiro

I was born subject like others to errors and defects,But never to the error of wanting to understand too much,Never to the error of wanting to understand only with the intellect..Never to the defect of demanding of the WorldThat it be anything that’s not the World.

Alberto Caeiro

Between what i see in a field and what I see in another fieldThere passes for a moment the figure of a man.His steps go with “him” in the same reality,But I look at him and them, and they’re two things:The “man” goes walking with his ideas, false and foreign,And his steps go with the ancient system that makes legs walk.I see him from a distance without any opinion at all.How perfect that he is in him what he is — his body,His true reality which doesn’t have desires or hopes,But muscles and the sure and impersonal way of using them.

Alberto Caeiro

The amorous shepherd has lost his staff,And his sheep are straying on the hillside,And he didn’t even play the flute he brought to play because he was thinking so much.No one came to him or went away. He never found his staff again.Others, cursing at him, gathered his sheep for him.No one had loved him, in the end.When he got up from the hillside and the false truth, he saw everything:The great valleys full of the same green as always,The great distant mountains, more real than any feeling,All reality, with the sky and the air and the fields that exist, is present.(And once again the air, that he’d missed for so long, entered coolly into his lungs)And he felt that the air was opening again, but with pain, a liberty in his chest.(7/10/1930)

Alberto Caeiro

Also at times, on the surface of streams,Water?bubbles formAnd grow and burstAnd have no meaning at allExcept that they’re water?bubblesGrowing and bursting.

Alberto Caeiro

There are no roses in my yard: what wind brought you?But I suddenly come from far away. I was sick for a moment.No wind whatsoever brought you now.Now you’re here.What you were isn’t you, or else the whole rose would be here.

Alberto Caeiro

I saw that there is no Nature,That Nature doesn’t exist,That there are hills, valleys, plains,That there are trees, flowers, weeds,That there are rivers and stones,But there is not a whole these belong to,That a real and true wholenessIs a sickness of our ideas.

Alberto Caeiro

He should be happy because he can think about the unhappiness of others!He’s stupid if he doesn’t know other people’s unhappiness is theirs,And isn’t cured from the outside,Because suffering isn’t like running out of ink,Or a trunk not having iron bands!There being injustice is like there being death.

Alberto Caeiro

I don’t always feel what I know I should feel.My thought crosses the river I swim very slowlyBecause the suit men made it wear weighs it down.

Alberto Caeiro

Previous 1 2 3 Next

Paganism Quotes - Page 2

Related Topics