iXtasis

"You'll know so much about suffering you will go through rapid cycles of cruelty and kindness, insight and maniacal blindness. You'll probably go mad. Then you'll be sane again. Then you may forget who you are." "Lo, a shadow of horror is risen In Eternity! Unknow, unprolific, self-clos'd, all-repelling: What Demon Hath form'd this abominable void, This soul-shudd'ring vacuum? Some said "It is Urizen." But known, abstracted, Brooding, secret, the dark power hid. Times on times he divided & measur'd. Space by space in his ninefold darkness, Unseen, unknown; changes appear'd. Like desolate mountains, rifted furious By the black winds of perturbation... Dark, revolving in silent activity: Unseen in tormenting passions: An activity unknown and horrible, A self-contemplating shadow, In enormous labours occupied... The petrific, abominable chaos." "Last night two superb Satans, and a not less extraordinary Sataness, climbed the mysterious stairs up which Hell launches it's assaults on the weakness of sleeping man, and communicates with him in secret. Gloriously they stood before me, like actors on a stage. A sulphurous splendor emanated from the three personages thus standing out in relief against the dense background of night. They looked so proud, with so imperious an air, that at first I mistook them for real Gods." "Uncertain hypothesis cannot justify a certain evil unless an equal evil is equally certain on the opposite hypothesis." "Whoever cannot bless, should learn to curse." "It was suffering and incapacity that created all afterworlds-this and that brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer most deeply." "Logic, intelligence, and reason could not master the dark forces in man that had a volition of their own and a hidden purpose... Man is bound to be guilty; our reasoning judgment can only intensify our pain, not relieve it. The good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do." "For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us." "The only thing to love is Fear itself. Love of Fear is the beginning of wisdom. The only thing to love is Fear itself. May Fear and Fear and Fear be everywhere... I am shaken like a leaf in the teeth of glory. His beard is lightening. Lightening is in his eye. His Word charges and illumines the universe. The air crackles with his blue-tongued lightning-haloed angels. His love is the twenty-story leap, the rope at the throat, the knife at the heart. He forgets not his own."