“Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball-I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me-I am part or particle of God” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

“Who dares nothing, need hope for nothing” — Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

More Charlie White.

“I have found little that is “good” about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think” — Letter from Sigmund Freud to Oskar Pfister, October 9, 1918

“The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript” – Aleister Crowley

Photograph by Paul Nicklen

“The Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked Whale, the Horned Whale, and the Unicorn Whale. He is certainly a curious example of the Unicornism to be found in almost every kingdom of animated nature. From certain cloistered old authors I have gathered that this same sea-unicorn’s horn was in ancient days regarded as the great antidote against poison, and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices. It was also distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way that the horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn. Originally it was in itself accounted an object of great curiosity. Black Letter tells me that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that voyage, when Queen Bess did gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from a window of Greenwich Palace, as his bold ship sailed down the Thames; when Sir Martin returned from that voyage, saith Black Letter, on bended knees he presented to her highness a prodigious long horn of the Narwhale, which for a long period after hung in the castle at Windsor. An Irish author avers that the Earl of Leicester, on bended knees, did likewise present to her highness another horn, pertaining to a land beast of the unicorn nature.

The Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a milk-white ground color, dotted with round and oblong spots of black. His oil is very superior, clear and fine; but there is little of it, and he is seldom hunted. He is mostly found in the circumpolar seas.” — from Moby-Dick, Herman Melville

“Must we no longer believe in words? Since when do they express the contrary of what the organ that utters them thinks and wants?
Herein fies the great secret:

Thought is made in the mouth” — Tristan Tzara, from Dada Manifesto of Feeble Love and Weak Love

Charlotte Brontë, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie , Angela Carter, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Mark Twain, T S Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes, John Keats, Wilfred Owen, Alan Bennett, George Bernard Shaw, Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare , Doris Lessing, Charles Dickens, Edward Lear

More info here.

“I didn’t have time to write poetry before, but now I have had the time to become a poet” — Saddam Hussein
confiding to lawyer Bushra Khalil while on trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity that he had written a new epic work.

Read the first half of Hussein’s missive “Unbind It” after the jump

“Unbind It” by Saddam Hussein

Unbind your soul. It is my soul mate and you are my soul’s beloved.

No house could have sheltered my heart as you have

If I were that house, you would be its dew

You are the soothing breeze

My soul is made fresh by you

And our Baath Party blossoms like a branch turns green.

The medicine does not cure the ailing but the white rose does.

The enemies set their plans and traps

And proceeded despite the fact they are all faulty.

It is a plan of arrogance and emptiness

It will prove to be nothing but defeated

We break it as rust devours steel

Like a sinner consumed by his sins

We never felt weak

We were made strong by our morals.

Our honorable stand, the companion of our soul,

The enemies forced strangers into our sea

And he who serves them will be made to weep.

Here we unveil our chests to the wolves

And will not tremble before the beast.

We fight the most difficult challenges

And beat them back, God willing.

How would they fare under such strains?

All people, we never let you down

And in catastrophes, our party is the leader.

I sacrifice my soul for you and for our nation

Blood is cheap in hard times

We never kneel or bend when attacking

But we even treat our enemy with honor. …