'Rock

When I die,
I will become a rock,
never touched
by compassion, joy or anger.
While being torn down by wind and rain,
It will only whip itself inwards
in eternal, impersonal silence.
and at last forget its own existence;
Floating clouds, distant thunder!

Though it may dream,
it will never sing.
Though broken in pieces,
it will never utter a word.
I will become such a rock.'

--Chi-hwan Yu, in: Best Loved Poems of Korea, Selected for Foreigners (1984)

'Here I am, condemned to live apart, for I am still too much of a man of letters to become a monk, and yet I am already too much of a monk to remain among men of letters...' --Huysmans

"non fleo privatum, sed generale chaos" --Maximian

'When Providence alone governed the earth, during the interregnum of mankind, she caused such slaughters that intelligence nearly perished. In the year 950, the son of one of Aurillac's serfs, the young Gerbert, sumed up almost an entire European tradition. He was, all by himself, civilization. What a moment in history! Men, through an admirable instinct, made him their master: he was the Pope Sylvester II. When he died, they began to build, on that column that had sustained the world, the legend that was to culminate in the Faust of Goethe.' --Remy de Gourmont

'Is it possible ...that one has not yet seen, known and said anything real or important? Is it possible that one has had millennia of time to observe, reflect and note down, and that one has let those millennia slip away like a recess interval at school in which one eats one's sandwich and an apple?' --Rilke

'On the day I was born, God was sick.' --Vallejo

Art may only be a moment in the awakening of our race, yet that nascent consciousness is and will be made up of such moments, light-quanta, each a bridge to morrow and promise for the past. One day materialism will mean that all things are artist's material; spirituality, that all things are perfected form already: and no paradox. This word Art is a name for the paradox. There are others.