Even so, I’m somebody.I’m the Discoverer of Nature.I’m the Argonaut of true sensations.I bring a new Universe to the UniverseBecause I bring the Universe to itself.
— Alberto CaeiroThe Tejo runs down from SpainAnd the Tejo goes into the sea in Portugal.Everybody knows that.But not many people know the river of my villageAnd where it comes fromAnd where it’s going.And so, because it belongs to less people,The river of my village is freer and greater.
— Alberto CaeiroThere is one element in Christianity which was not borrowed from Paganism -- religious intolerance. Referring to Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, a writer on China says: 'Between the followers of the three national religions there is not only a total absence of persecution and bitter feeling, but a very great indifference as to which of them a man may belong.... Among the politer classes, when strangers meet, the question is asked: 'To what sublime religion do you belong,' and each one pronounces a eulogium, not on his own religion, but on that professed by the others, and concludes with the oft-repeated formula 'Religions are many; reason is one; we are all brothers.
— John E. RemsburgOne day when God fell asleepAnd the Holy Ghost went off flying,He got into a box of miracles and stole three.With the first he made it so that no one would know he had run away.With the second he made himself a human boy forever.With the third he created a Christ eternally crucifiedAnd left him nailed to the cross that there is in HeavenWhere he’s used as a model for other crosses.Then he ran away to the sunAnd came down on the first ray he caught.
— Alberto CaeiroNatural polytheism embraces the science of ecology as a basic metaphor for theological inquiry. In other words, natural polytheism seeks to understand our relationship with the gods as an aspect of interrelated systems of being, consciousness and meaning. Its focus is, first and foremost, on the wildernesses that defy our carefully mapped boundary lines, that penetrate even the most civilized cultural centers and underlie our most cherished notions of what it means to be human.' - Alison Leigh Lilly, 'Natural Theology: Polytheism Beyond the Pale.
— John HalsteadBetween what I see in a field and what I see in another fieldThere passes for a moment the figure of a man.His steps go with “him” in the same reality,But I look at him and them, and they’re two things:The “man” goes walking with his ideas, false and foreign,And his steps go with the ancient system that makes legs walk.I see him from a distance without any opinion at all.How perfect that he is in him what he is — his body,His true reality which doesn’t have desires or hopes,But muscles and the sure and impersonal way of using them.
— Alberto CaeiroThat lady has a piano.It’s nice, but it’s not the running of riversOr the murmuring trees make ..Who needs a piano?It’s better to have earsAnd love Nature.
— Alberto CaeiroShe goes on with her beautiful hair and mouth like before,I go on like before, alone in the field.It’s like my head had been lowered,And if I think this, and raise my headAnd the golden sun dries the need to cry I can’t stop having.How vast the field and interior love... !I look, and I forget, like dryness where there was water and trees losing their leaves.
— Alberto CaeiroThe portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the doors, and shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty and peace; and now when I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on the rose in the hand of the Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate and precise that it seemed more like a thought than a flower, or at the grey dawn and rapturous faces of my Francesca, I knew all a Christian's ecstasy without his slavery to rule and custom; when I pondered over the antique bronze gods and goddesses, which I had mortgaged my house to buy, I had all a pagan's delight in various beauty and without his terror at sleepless destiny and his labour with many sacrifices; and I had only to go to my bookshelf, where every book was bound in leather, stamped with intricate ornament, and of a carefully chosen colour: Shakespeare in the orange of the glory of the world, Dante in the dull red of his anger, Milton in the blue grey of his formal calm; and I could experience what I would of human passions without their bitterness and without satiety. I had gathered about me all gods because I believed in none, and experienced every pleasure because I gave myself to none, but held myself apart, individual, indissoluble, a mirror of polished steel: I looked in the triumph of this imagination at the birds of Hera, glowing in the firelight as though they were wrought of jewels; and to my mind, for which symbolism was a necessity, they seemed the doorkeepers of my world, shutting out all that was not of as affluent a beauty as their own; and for a moment I thought as I had thought in so many other moments, that it was possible to rob life of every bitterness except the bitterness of death; and then a thought which had followed this thought, time after time, filled me with a passionate sorrow.
— W.B. YeatsThe ultimate truth is mystical truth, the ultimate reality is sacred chaos.
— Muzwot