3
" The hoopoe said: 'Your heart's congealed like ice;
When will you free yourself from cowardice?
Since you have such a short time to live here,
What difference does it make? What should you fear?
The world is filth and sin, and homeless men
Must enter it and homeless leave again.
They die, as worms, in squalid pain; if we
Must perish in this quest, that, certainly,
Is better than a life of filth and grief.
If this great search is vain, if my belief
Is groundless, it is right that I should die.
So many errors throng the world - then why
Should we not risk this quest? To suffer blame
For love is better than a life of shame.
No one has reached this goal, so why appeal
To those whose blindness claims it is unreal?
I'd rather die deceived by dreams than give
My heart to home and trade and never live.
We've been and heard so much - what have we learned?
Not for one moment has the self been spurned;
Fools gather round and hinder our release.
When will their stale, insistent whining cease?
We have no freedom to achieve our goal
Until from Self and fools we free the soul.
To be admitted past the veil you must
Be dead to all the crowd considers just.
Once past the veil you understand the Way
From which the crowd's glib courtiers blindly stray.
If you have any will, leave women's stories,
And even if this search for hidden glories
Proves blasphemy at last, be sure our quest
Is not mere talk but an exacting test.
The fruit of love's great tree is poverty;
Whoever knows this knows humility.
When love has pitched his tent in someone's breast,
That man despairs of life and knows no rest.
Love's pain will murder him and blandly ask
A surgeon's fee for managing the task -
The water that he drinks brings pain, his bread
Is turned to blood immediately shed;
Though he is weak, faint, feebler than an ant,
Love forces him to be her combatant;
He cannot take one mouthful unaware
That he is floundering in a sea of care. "
― Attar of Nishapur
4
" Glossa
Time goes by, time comes along,
All is old and all is new;
What is right and what is wrong,
You must think and ask of you;
Have no hope and have no fear,
Waves that rise can never hold;
If they urge or if they cheer,
You remain aloof and cold.
To our sight a lot will glisten,
Many sounds will reach our ear;
Who could take the time to listen
And remember all we hear?
Keep aside from all that patter,
Seek yourself, far from the throng
When with loud and idle clatter
Time goes by, time comes along.
Nor forget the tongue of reason
Or its even scales depress
When the moment, changing season,
Wears the mask of happiness -
It is born of reason's slumber
And may last a wink as true:
For the one who knows its number
All is old and all is new.
Be as to a play, spectator,
As the world unfolds before:
You will know the heart of matter
Should they act two parts or four;
When they cry or tear asunder
From your seat enjoy along
And you'll learn from art to wonder
What is right and what is wrong.
Past and future, ever blending,
Are the twin sides of same page:
New start will begin with ending
When you know to learn from age;
All that was or be tomorrow
We have in the present, too;
But what's vain and futile sorrow
You must think and ask of you;
For the living cannot sever
From the means we've always had:
Now, as years ago, and ever,
Men are happy or are sad:
Other masks, same play repeated;
Diff'rent tongues, same words to hear;
Of your dreams so often cheated,
Have no hope and have no fear.
Hope not when the villains cluster
By success and glory drawn:
Fools with perfect lack of luster
Will outshine Hyperion!
Fear it not, they'll push each other
To reach higher in the fold,
Do not side with them as brother,
Waves that rise can never hold.
Sounds of siren songs call steady
Toward golden nets, astray;
Life attracts you into eddies
To change actors in the play;
Steal aside from crowd and bustle,
Do not look, seem not to hear
From your path, away from hustle,
If they urge or if they cheer;
If they reach for you, go faster,
Hold your tongue when slanders yell;
Your advice they cannot master,
Don't you know their measure well?
Let them talk and let them chatter,
Let all go past, young and old;
Unattached to man or matter,
You remain aloof and cold.
You remain aloof and cold
If they urge or if they cheer;
Waves that rise can never hold,
Have no hope and have no fear;
You must think and ask of you
What is right and what is wrong;
All is old and all is new,
Time goes by, time comes along. "
― Mihai Eminescu , Poems
10
" After simmering years of censorship and repression, the masses finally throng the streets. The chants echoing off the walls to build to a roar from all directions, stoking the courage of the crowds as they march on the center of the capital. Activists inside each column maintain contact with each other via text messages; communications centers receive reports and broadcast them around the city; affinity groups plot the movements of the police via digital mapping. A rebel army of bloggers uploads video footage for all the world to see as the two hosts close for battle. Suddenly, at the moment of truth, the lines go dead. The insurgents look up from the blank screens of their cell phones to see the sun reflecting off the shields of the advancing riot police, who are still guided by close circuits of fully networked technology. The rebels will have to navigate by dead reckoning against a hyper-informed adversary.
All this already happened, years ago, when President Mubarak shut down the communications grid during the Egyptian uprising of 2011. A generation hence, when the same scene recurs, we can imagine the middle-class protesters - the cybourgeoisie - will simply slump forward, blind and deaf and wracked by seizures as the microchips in their cerebra run haywire, and it will be up to the homeless and destitute to guide them to safety. "
― CrimethInc. , Contradictionary
15
" I asked the earth and it answered, “I am not He”; and all things that are in the earth made the same confession. I asked the sea and the deeps and the creeping things, and they answered, “We are not your God, seek higher.” I asked the winds that blow, and the whole air with all that is in it answered, “Anaximenes was wrong; I am not God.” I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars, and they answered, “Neither are we God whom you seek.” And I said to all the things that throng about the gateways of the senses: “Tell me of my God, since you are not He. Tell me something of Him.” And they cried out in a great voice: “He made us.” My question was my gazing upon them, and their answer was their beauty.
Man is a silent, incarnate word of God. The moon, the stars, the sun, the sea, the firmament are the visible proof of the existence and omnipotence of God, who created them out of sheer love. These creatures are the powerful, mysterious voice of God. "
― Robert Sarah
18
" In winter night Massachusetts Street is dismal, the ground's frozen cold, the ruts and pock holes have ice, thin snow slides over the jagged black cracks. The river is frozen to stolidity, waits; hung on a shore with remnant show-off boughs of June-- Ice skaters, Swedes, Irish girls, yellers and singers--they throng on the white ice beneath the crinkly stars that have no altar moon, no voice, but down heavy tragic space make halyards of Heaven on in deep, to where the figures fantastic amassed by scientists cream in a cold mass; the veil of Heaven on tiaras and diadems of a great Eternity Brunette called night. "
― Jack Kerouac , Maggie Cassidy
