Quotes

Just a few quotes for today, as I haven't updated this blog in a while... :/

"We dance around the ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows." --Robert Frost, poet

"Without Evil there can be no Good, so it must be Good to be Evil sometimes." --Satan in "South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut"

"God answers every prayer. But sometimes the answer is, 'No'." --priest from an episode of "Law & Order"

"Not all who wander are lost." --J. R. R. Tolkien

"Follow your Bliss." --Joseph Campbell

"The problem with Yahweh is that He thinks He's God." --op. cit.

"There are two kinds of knowledge; Symbolic Knowledge and Intimate Knowledge. Science deals with the former, arts deal with the latter. The primary focus of the religious pursuit is the latter. To confuse the boundary by using physics to analyze spiritual experiences is to largely miss the point." --user "felisarcanum" on LiveJournal

"The injection of religion has a coma-like effect"
--from "Wreath of Barbs," :wupmscut:

"Witchcraft is, and was, not... for everyone. Unless you have an attraction to the occult, a sense of wonder, a feeling that you can slip for a few minutes out of the world into the world of faery, it is of no use to you." --Gerald Gardner



All the following quotes are from the LunaBar tool available from Infra-Azure Labs.

But sun and moon, those watchmen of the world,
With their own lanterns traversing around
The mighty, the revolving vault, have taught
Unto mankind that seasons of the years
Return again.
--Lucretius, De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things).

Let not my Heart-soul be driven away from me;
and grant me a sight of the Disk of the Sun
and the beholding of the Moon for ever and ever.
--Egyptian Book of the Dead.

The sacred Queen of Night,
Who pours a lovely, gentle light,
Wide o’er the dark, by wanderers blest,
Conducting them to peace and rest.
--Thomson, "Ode to Seraphina."

For ages the army of spirits, once so near,
has been receding farther and farther from us,
banished by the magic wand of science from hearth and home,
from ruined cell and ivied tower,
from haunted glade and lonely mere,
from the riven murky cloud that belches forth the lightning,
and from those fairer clouds that pillow the silvery moon...
--Frazier, "The Golden Bough."

"...And hail their queen, fair regent of the night." --Erasmus Darwin, "Botanic Garden (pt. I, canto II, l. 90)."

Full summer moon, floating in the warm evening air
Just above eye level, unseen by me
With my hurrying, worrying, encircled in frantic anxiety
My endless loop of wasted time.
Her energy pulls my focus and spirit upward
To see her miracle self watching me
Relaxing me, like a gentle reminder to sit up straight:
Moon’s yin to gravity’s yang.
--"Look Up," Karen Ley Smith.

How like a queen comes forth the lonely Moon
From the slow opening curtains of the clouds ;
Walking in beauty to her midnight throne !
--George Croly, "Diana."


Queen and Huntress, chaste and fair,
Now the sun is laid to sleep,
Seated in thy silver chair
State in wonted manner keep
Hesperus entreats thy light,
Goddess excellently bright.

Earth, let not thy envious shade
Dare itself to interpose;
Cynthia’s shining orb was made
Heaven to clear when day did close:
Bless us then with wished sight,
Goddess excellently bright.

Lay thy bow of pearl apart
And thy crystal-shining quiver;
Give unto the flying hart
Space to breathe how short soever;
Thou that mak’st a day of night,
Goddess excellently bright!
--Ben Jonson, "Hymn to Diana."

Hail Queen, great Moon,
white-armed Divinity,
Fair-haired and favourable!
--Homeric Hymns, "Hymn to the Moon", trans. by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Ye stars and moon, that, when the sun retires,
Support his empire with succeeding fires;
And thou, great Hecate, friend to my design;
Songs, mutt’ring spells, your magick forces join;
And thou, O Earth, the magazine that yields
The midnight sorcerer drugs; skies, mountains, fields;
--Ovid, "Metamorphoses," Dryden's translation.


Fair goddess of the rainbow !
Of the stars and of the moon !
The queen all-powerful
Of hunters and the night,
We beg of thee thy aid
To give good fortune to us !
--Spell to Diana, in C.G. Leland, "Unpublished Legends of Virgil".

Hecate: the moon before she has risen and after she has set.
Astarte: the crescent moon, “the moon with crescent horns.”
Diana or Cynthia: the moon in the open vault of heaven,
who “hunts the clouds.”
--Brewer, "Dictionary of Phrase & Fable".


Lovely Goddess of the bow!
Lovely Goddess of the arrows!
Of all hounds and of all hunting
Thou who wakest in starry heaven
When the sun is sunk in slumber
Thou with moon upon they forehead...
--"To Diana," collected in Leland, "Aradia."

Selene or Luna: the moon personified, properly the full moon,
who loved the sleeping Endymion.
Endymion: moonlight on a bank, field, or garden.
Phoebe: the moon as the sister of the sun.
--Brewer, "Dictionary of Phrase & Fable".

...and on all sides beautiful maidens
stepped from the trees into the bright light of the moon.
These were the wood-nymphs, daughters of the earth-mother,
who came every night to hold their dances, in the forest.
--"The Violet Fairy Book" (1901).

To behold the wandering moon
Riding near her highest noon,
Like one that had been led astray
Through the heav’n’s wide pathless way;
--Milton, "Il Penseroso."

The fairies, from their nightly haunt,
In copse or dell, or round the trunk revered
Of Herne’s moon-silvered oak, shall chase away
Each fog, each blight, and dedicate to peace
Thy classic shade.
--Quoted in The Folk-Lore of Plants.

The aspiring Mountains and the winding Streams,
Empress of Night! are gladdened by thy beams;
A look of thine the wilderness pervades,
And penetrates the forest’s inmost shades;
--William Wordsworth, "To The Moon."

In moons and tides and weather wise,
He read the clouds as prophecies,
And foul or fair could well divine,
By many an occult hint and sign.
--Whittier, Snowbound.

Dian’s Worshippers: Midnight revellers; so called
because they return home by moonlight. Dian means the moon.
--Brewer's "Dictionary of Phrase and Fable."

The hour is nigh; the waning Queen
Walks forth to rule the later night;
Crown’d with the sparkle of a Star,
And throned on orb of ashen light.
--Sir Richard F. Burton, "Kasidah."

Bright wanderer, fair coquette of Heaven,
To whom alone it has been given
To change and be adored for ever.
--Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Fragment: To the Moon"."

Let us be Diana’s foresters,
Gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon;
And let men say we be men of good government, being governed,
as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon...
--Shakespeare, "King Henry IV," I, ii.

The year is divided into four seasons;
The first season is of a frigid complexion, and this is “Winter”;
The second is of the complexion of Air, and this is “Spring”;
Then follows the third, which is “Summer”, and is of the complexion of Fire;
Lastly, there is the fourth, wherein fruits are matured, which is “Autumn”.
--The Turba Philosophorum, ca. 12 century.


Then came the jolly Sommer, being dress’d
In a thin silken cassock coloured greene,
That was unlined all, to be more light;
And on his head a garland well beseene.
--Edmund Spenser, "Faerie Queene."

Come, Sons of Summer, by whose toile,
We are the Lords of Wine and Oile :
By whose tough labors, and rough hands,
We rip up first, then reap our lands.
Crown’d with the eares of corne, now come,
And, to the Pipe, sing Harvest Home.
--Robert Herrick.

But yonder comes the powerful king of day,
Rejoicing in the east. The lessening cloud,
The kindling azure, and the mountain’s brow,
Illumed with fluid gold, his near approach
Betoken glad.
--Thomson.