Rilke – Letters to a young poet

What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours – that is what you must be able to attain.

L. Untermeyer

The ordinary man lives by the creative spirit. He thinks in images and dreams
in fantasy; he lives by poetry. Yet he seems to distrust it.

H. Matisse- Woman Before a Fish Bowl

W. H. Auden – In Memory of W.B. Yeats

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

Q. Meillassoux – After Finitude

Philosophy is the invention of strange forms of argumentation,
necessarily bordering on sophistry, which remains its dark
structural double. To philosophize is always to develop an idea
whose elaboration and defence require a novel kind of
argumentation, the model for which lies neither in positive
science – not even in logic – nor in some supposedly innate faculty
for proper reasoning.

A. Boghossian – Untitled

W. H. Auden

And ruled by dead men never met,
By pious guess deluded,
Upon the stool of madness set
Or stool of desolation,
Sits murderous and clear-headed;
Enormous beauties round him move,
For grandiose is his vision
And grandiose his love.

 

H. Fuseli – The Nightmare

P. Sloterdijk – Thinker on Stage

The searcher must burn out when he senses that nothing will save him from himself. He is extinguished in the dilemma of having to choose between the unbearable and the impossible. Only in the fire of disillusionment can the last remaining illusions be burned away. With the departure of what is being sought, the search itself becomes the goal and the path flows with a tragic bend into the pain from which it was initially able to turn away.

N. Roerich – Hermit

Ch. Baudelaire – To a Madonna

If I can’t, in spite of all my painstaking art,
Carve a Moon of silver for your Pedestal,
I shall put the Serpent which is eating my heart
Under your heels, so that you may trample and mock,
Triumphant queen, fecund in redemptions,
That monster all swollen with hatred and spittle.

[Si je ne puis, malgré tout mon art diligent
Pour Marchepied tailler une Lune d’argent
Je mettrai le Serpent qui me mord les entrailles
Sous tes talons, afin que tu foules et railles
Reine victorieuse et féconde en rachats
Ce monstre tout gonflé de haine et de crachats.]

O. Redon – Onnes (Christ and the Serpent)

Paris, Texas