Skies Aesthetic Quotes

God is most proud of creation as an aesthetic thing. You have only to look at the exquisite harmony of sky and trees and moon and stars to see what a good job God did, aesthetically.

People think they understand things because they become familiar with them. This is only superficial knowledge. It is the knowledge of the astronomer who knows the names of the stars, the botanist who knows the classification of the leaves and flowers, the artist who knows the aesthetics of green and red. This is not to know nature itself- the earth and sky, green and red. Astronomer, botanist, and artist have done no more than grasp impressions and interpret them, each within the vault of his own mind. The more involved they become with the activity of the intellect, the more they set themselves apart and the more difficult it becomes to live naturally.

AESTHETICS OF INTEGRITY For every star in the sky Someone is holding his ground.

We live in a world full of accidents finally in which on aesthetic principles have a consistency of which we can be sure. Right and wrong we will struggle with forever striving to create and maintain an ethical balance. Right and wrong we will struggle with forever, striving to create and maintain an ethical balance; but the shimmer of summer rain under the street lamps or the great flashing glare of artillery against a night sky – such brutal beauty is beyond dispute.

There were people who escaped Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors. p.116

The pursuit of science has often been compared to the scaling of mountains, high and not so high. But who amongst us can hope, even in imagination, to scale the Everest and reach its summit when the sky is blue and the air is still, and in the stillness of the air survey the entire Himalayan range in the dazzling white of the snow stretching to infinity? None of us can hope for a comparable vision of nature and of the universe around us. But there is nothing mean or lowly in standing in the valley below and awaiting the sun to rise over Kinchinjunga.

We can't stop reading. Compulsively we find ourselves reading significance into dreams (we construct a science upon it); into tea-leaves and the fall of cards. We look up at the shifting vapours in the sky, and see faces, lost cities, defeated armies. Isolated in the dark, with nothing to hear and no surfaces to touch, we hallucinate reading-matter. Our craving becomes generalized – for 'the meaning of life'. If we lived alone in a featureless desert we should learn to place the individual grains of sand in a moral or aesthetic hierarchy. We should long to find the greatest grain of sand in the world, and even (in order to find a fixed point of orientation in time as well as in space) the all-time greatest grain of sand; the grain of sand whose discovery changed our whole understanding of grains of sand for ever.

The starry sky began to shine,when assigned night spread with its ‘moon lamp’ for all of the wistful thoughts,lay below the tormented Earth’s nocturnal light and those splendid visions caught my pounding spirits.

Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors.

Men of letters, following in the painters' wake, conspired suddenly to find artistic value in the turns; and red-nosed comedians were lauded to the skies for their sense of character; fat female singers, who had bawled obscurely for twenty years, were discovered to possess inimitable drollery; there were those who found an aesthetic delight in performing dogs; while others exhausted their vocabulary to extol the distinction of conjurers and trick-cyclists.

Mestre. Say the word without hissing the conurbated villain, and pitying its citizens. As quickly as they can, two million tourists pass through, or by, Mestre each year, and each one will be struck by the same thought as they wonder at the aesthetic opposition that it represents. Mestre is an ugly town but ugly only in the same way that Michael Jackson might be desccribed as eccentric or a Tabasco Vindaloo flambéed in rocket fuel might be described as warm. Mestre is almost excremental in its hideousness: a fetid, fly-blown, festering, industrial urbanization, scarred with varicose motorways, flyovers, rusting railway sidings and the rubbish of a billion holidaymakers gradually burning, spewing thick black clouds into the Mediterranean sky. A town with apparently no centre, a utilitarian ever-expandable wasteland adapted to house the displaced poor, the shorebound, outpriced, domicile-deprived exiles from its neighbouring city. For, just beyond the condom- and polystyrene-washed, black-stained, mud shores of Marghera, Mestre's very own oil refinery, less than a mile away across the waters of the lagoon in full sight of its own dispossessed citizens, is the Jewel of Adriatic. Close enough for all to feel the magnetism, there stands the most beautiful icon of Renaissance glory and, like so much that can attract tourism, a place too lovely to be left in the hands of its natives, the Serenissima itself, Venice.

In a world without sky, land becomes an abyss. And the poem, one of condolence's gifts. And an adjective of wind: northern or southern. Don't describe what the camera sees of your wounds and scream to hear yourself, to know that you're still alive, and that life on this earth is possible. Invent a wish for speech, devise a direction or a mirage to prolong the hope, and sing. Aesthetic is a freedom. I said: A life that is defined only in antithesis to death . . . isn't a life!

He ambled towards the abyss again, Acquiescing to the adroit turns of his Abtenauer, his Altai horse, his Appaloosa, His Ardennais, and his Australian Brumby….. Agilely each equine adumbrates the aesthetics Of aestivating, much like aficionados of nature And much like ailurophiles, too…… Ambrosial aromas attract his attention to the Assemblage of amaranth foliage growing At the abyss’s edge. “Anglophile!” “Antediluvian!” “Aplomb!” “Apocryphal!” “Apophenia!” “Apothecary!” Each petal calls out to him as he captures their vision in his Aqueous humor. Now an arabesque they display, Then some archipelago formation, as they (those purple perennials) Give in to the Wind’s whimsy. “What’s in my arsenal?” He asks himself. “Do I have Authenticity, like Astrophysics and Astronomy?” “Am I at last in my Autumn, torn asunder by Avarice? Shall I now step toward Winter to wither and waste away, without rebirth?” The Summer’s azure skies call him back, reminding him of his herd. Homeward he must turn. The pony pushes him back to the plain. And, as he trudges away from the abyss, the warriors of darkness— His old battle buddies who left him behind as they raced toward Providence— Rattle in his mind with their Paleolithic war toys, on the war path, chanting: “The greatest battles we face are in the silent chambers of our own souls…..” -----from the poem 'Summer Battle' in the book HOT STUFF: CELEBRATING SUMMER'S SIMMER AND SIZZLE, by Mariecor Ruediger

The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Oh, what a pleasure that was! Mollie Katzen's handwritten and illustrated recipes that recalled some glorious time in upstate New York when a girl with an appetite could work at a funky vegetarian restaurant and jot down some tasty favorites between shifts. That one had the Pumpkin Tureen soup that Margo had made so many times when she first got the book. She loved the cheesy onion soup served from a pumpkin with a hot dash of horseradish and rye croutons. And the Cardamom Coffee Cake, full of butter, real vanilla, and rich brown sugar, said to be a favorite at the restaurant, where Margo loved to imagine the patrons picking up extras to take back to their green, grassy, shady farmhouses dotted along winding country roads. Linda's Kitchen by Linda McCartney, Paul's first wife, the vegetarian cookbook that had initially spurred her yearlong attempt at vegetarianism (with cheese and eggs, thank you very much) right after college. Margo used to have to drag Calvin into such phases and had finally lured him in by saying that surely anything Paul would eat was good enough for them. Because of Linda's Kitchen, Margo had dived into the world of textured vegetable protein instead of meat, and tons of soups, including a very good watercress, which she never would have tried without Linda's inspiration. It had also inspired her to get a gorgeous, long marble-topped island for prep work. Sometimes she only cooked for the aesthetic pleasure of the gleaming marble topped with rustic pottery containing bright fresh veggies, chopped to perfection. Then Bistro Cooking by Patricia Wells caught her eye, and she took it down. Some pages were stuck together from previous cooking nights, but the one she turned to, the most splattered of all, was the one for Onion Soup au Gratin, the recipe that had taught her the importance of cheese quality. No mozzarella or broken string cheeses with- maybe- a little lacy Swiss thrown on. And definitely none of the "fat-free" cheese that she'd tried in order to give Calvin a rich dish without the cholesterol. No, for this to be great, you needed a good, aged, nutty Gruyère from what you couldn't help but imagine as the green grassy Alps of Switzerland, where the cows grazed lazily under a cheerful children's-book blue sky with puffy white clouds. Good Gruyère was blocked into rind-covered rounds and aged in caves before being shipped fresh to the USA with a whisper of fairy-tale clouds still lingering over it. There was a cheese shop downtown that sold the best she'd ever had. She'd tried it one afternoon when she was avoiding returning home. A spunky girl in a visor and an apron had perked up as she walked by the counter, saying, "Cheese can change your life!" The charm of her youthful innocence would have been enough to be cheered by, but the sample she handed out really did it. The taste was beyond delicious. It was good alone, but it cried out for ham or turkey or a rich beefy broth with deep caramelized onions for soup.

Wherever you go, Provincetown will always take you back, at whatever age and in whatever condition. Because time moves somewhat differently there, it is possible to return after ten years or more and run into an acquaintance, on Commercial or at the A&P, who will ask mildly, as if he’d seen you the day before yesterday, what you’ve been doing with yourself. The streets of Provincetown are not in any way threatening, at least not to those with an appetite for the full range of human passions. If you grow deaf and blind and lame in Provincetown, some younger person with a civic conscience will wheel you wherever you need to go; if you die there, the marshes and dunes are ready to receive your ashes. While you’re alive and healthy, for as long as it lasts, the golden hands of the clock tower at Town Hall will note each hour with an electric bell as we below, on our purchase of land, buy or sell, paint or write or fish for bass, or trade gossip on the post office steps. The old bayfront houses will go on dreaming, at least until the emptiness between their boards proves more durable than the boards themselves. The sands will continue their slow devouring of the forests that were the Pilgrims’ first sight of North America, where man, as Fitzgerald put it, “must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” The ghost of Dorothy Bradford will walk the ocean floor off Herring Cove, draped in seaweed, surrounded by the fleeting silver lights of fish, and the ghost of Guglielmo Marconi will tap out his messages to those even longer dead than he. The whales will breach and loll in their offshore world, dive deep into black canyons, and swim south when the time comes. Herons will browse the tidal pools; crabs with blue claws tipped in scarlet will scramble sideways over their own shadows. At sunset the dunes will take on their pink-orange light, and just after sunset the boats will go luminous in the harbor. Ashes of the dead, bits of their bones, will mingle with the sand in the salt marsh, and wind and water will further disperse the scraps of wood, shell, and rope I’ve used for Billy’s various memorials. After dark the raccoons and opossums will start on their rounds; the skunks will rouse from their burrows and head into town. In summer music will rise up. The old man with the portable organ will play for passing change in front of the public library. People in finery will sing the anthems of vanished goddesses; people who are still trying to live by fishing will pump quarters into jukeboxes that play the songs of their high school days. As night progresses, people in diminishing numbers will wander the streets (where whaling captains and their wives once promenaded, where O’Neill strode in drunken furies, where Radio Girl—who knows where she is now?—announced the news), hoping for surprises or just hoping for what the night can be counted on to provide, always, in any weather: the smell of water and its sound; the little houses standing square against immensities of ocean and sky; and the shapes of gulls gliding overhead, white as bone china, searching from their high silence for whatever they might be able to eat down there among the dunes and marshes, the black rooftops, the little lights tossing on the water as the tides move out or in.

The environment is not an "other" to us. It is not a collection of things that we encounter. Rather, it is part of our being. It is the locus of our existence and identity. We cannot and do not exist apart from it. It is through empathic projection that we come to know our environment, understand how we are part of it and how it is part of us. This is the bodily mechanism by which we can participate in nature, not just as hikers or climbers or swimmers, but as part of nature itself, part of a larger, all-encompassing whole. A mindful embodied spirituality is thus an ecological spirituality. An embodied spirituality requires an aesthetic attitude to the world that is central to self-nurturance, to the nurturance of others, and to the nurturance of the world itself. Embodied spirituality requires an understanding that nature is not inanimate and less than human, but animated and more than human. It requires pleasure, joy in the bodily connection with earth and air, sea and sky, plants and animals - and the recognition that they are all more than human, more than any human beings could ever achieve. Embodied spirituality is more than spiritual experience. It is an ethical relationship to the physical world.

No: I want nothing. I’ve already said I want nothing. Don’t come to me with conclusions! The only conclusion is death. Don’t bring me aesthetics! Don’t speak to me of morals! Get out of here with metaphysics! Don’t trumpet complete systems, don’t line up conquests Of science (science, my God, science!) — Of the sciences, the arts, of modern civilization! What harm did I ever do all the gods? If they have the truth, let them keep it! I’m a technician, but I have technique only in technique. Beyond that I’m crazy, with every right to be so. With every right to be so, do you hear? Don’t bother me, for the love of God! Did they want me married, futile, quotidian and taxable? Did they want me the opposite of that, the opposite of anything? If I were another person, I would’ve done what they wanted. The way I am, give me a break! Go to hell without me, Or let me go alone! Why do we have to go together? Don’t take me by the arm! I don’t like being taken by the arm. I want to be alone. I just told you: I’m alone! Ah, what a nuisance, them wanting to keep me company! The blue sky — the same as in my childhood — Eternal truth, empty and perfect! O River Tejo, glassy, ancestral, mute, Small truth where the sky reflects itself! O sorrows revisited, Lisbon past and present! You give nothing, you take nothing, you’re nothing I feel. Leave me in peace! I’m not dallying, I never dally... And as long as the Abyss and Silence dally, I want to be alone!

I shall tell you now and for no extra charge that “living in the present” seems to be the key component across every scripture, self-help book, and religious group I’ve encountered. To harmonize with life in each moment, not to make happiness contingent on any prospective condition. Not to be tormented by the past but to live in the reality of “now,” all else being a mental construct. Osho, Eckhart Tolle, Jesus, Buddha, Oprah—anyone who’s anyone who’s ever grown a beard or shaved their head or dropped out and looked back at the material world with a sage shake of the head, a knowing wag of the finger, and a beatific smile—are all saying “Snap out of it”; liberate yourself from the tyranny of egoic introspection. This is the seam of the self that consumerism can continually mine, the unrelenting inner voice that wants and fears, that attaches and rejects. The people in robes and beards want us to learn to live beyond it, to calmly watch the chattering ego like clouds moving across a perfect sky, to identify with the stillness that is aware of the voice, that hears the voice, not the voice itself. Well, that’s easy for them to say, all relaxed in their flowing robes, like giant, hairy babies, it’s extremely difficult, especially when that voice has such omnipresent external allies to rely on, whilst the very idea of a spiritual life has been marginalized and maligned. Perhaps this state needn’t be the product of strenuous esotericism; it’s possible that calm presence of mind is our natural state and our jittery materialism the result of constant indoctrination. Much as I love spirituality to be served up properly branded in a turban, dressed in curtains, the accoutrements are surely an aesthetic, not a prerequisite.

How do I know I have lived? How can I be certain my days were not squandered? What criteria, which principles qualify life as lived? Certainly, I have endured trials and troubles, and I learned from life’s lessons. I grew wise as well as empathetic. But is edification and its accompanying traits the ultimate aim for living? I have traveled. Oh, I have seen marvelous wonders in this world. Skies that were artic blue, emerald green, soft lilac, and rosy red. Mountains fixed like monuments to the gods. Waters as clear as crystal, as blue as larimar, deeper than a leviathan’s lair, and as vast as the night’s sky. I have witnessed pyramids and castles, colosseums, great walls, and temples. Is this living? To travel, to see, to awe at the world’s aesthetic wonders? I have experienced great joys in my days: laughter, kindness, fun, love, thrills, successes. I have suffered a great many sorrows: sickness, loss, pain, cruelty, vengeance, disparagement. I have valued the good and abhorred the bad. Is this the ultimate feat of living? I have been actively doing: from sailing to flying, acting to singing, hiking to biking. I have dived, danced, drummed, battled, built, raced, and used my incredible body to perform every activity I desired. I gained strength and endurance in the process. Is this a sure sign of living? I have been part of a family and raised my own. I have formed lasting, loyal friendships that have passed the test of time. I have felt what it means to sacrifice for loved ones, shared in their joys and sorrows, prayed for tender mercies and miracles in their lives. I have loved and been loved in return. Is it connection to family and friends, the relationships developed between kindred, is this what it means to truly live? How do I know I have lived? As my days near an end, how can I be certain my life was worthwhile and not wasted? Did I accomplish what life mandates of those who truly live? What qualifies life as lived?

Every time I am shown to an old, dimly lit, and, I would add, impeccably clean toilet in a Nara or Kyoto temple, I am impressed with the singular virtues of Japanese architecture. The parlor may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet is truly a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss. No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, basking in the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in meditation or gazing out at the garden. The novelist Natsume Sōseki counted his morning trips to the toilet a great pleasure, “a physiological delight” he called it. And surely there could be no better place to savor this pleasure than a Japanese toilet where, surrounded by tranquil walls and finely grained wood, one looks out upon blue skies and green leaves. As I have said there are certain prerequisites: a degree of dimness, absolute cleanliness, and quiet so complete one can hear the hum of a mosquito. I love to listen from such a toilet to the sound of softly falling rain, especially if it is a toilet of the Kantō region, with its long, narrow windows at floor level; there one can listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the earth as they wash over the base of a stone lantern and freshen the moss about the stepping stones. And the toilet is the perfect place to listen to the chirping of insects or the song of the birds, to view the moon, or to enjoy any of those poignant moments that mark the change of the seasons. Here, I suspect, is where haiku poets over the ages have come by a great many of their ideas. Indeed one could with some justice claim that of all the elements of Japanese architecture, the toilet is the most aesthetic. Our forebears, making poetry of everything in their lives, transformed what by rights should be the most unsanitary room in the house into a place of unsurpassed elegance, replete with fond associations with the beauties of nature.

This is why he appears in so much folklore and in so many of the myths of earlier religions as a mysterious chthonic and land-based figure, not just a sky or air-based presence. So great is the aesthetic distinction between the realm of sky and the realm of earth, that we see in the evolution of myth (in nearly all places) two distinct Gods often forming from this: a fatherly, usually more severe and distant "Sky" God, and a more sensual, wild, tricky, or dangerous "Earth" God or spirit, who might be his son and sometimes his adversary.

The mountains fell in love  with the sky -  while knowing the ocean  is much nearer;  and still,  they loved it the same.

It is okay if you change every once in a while; even the sky needs to let go of its stars to give the sun a home for a while.

Champagne lips and tired eyes under endless velvet skies — a love living only for the highs.

Color, the principle: First, you should think about how color affects the psychology of the user. Then, you should think about the role of color in the product. Finally, you should think about the color itself. According to the theory of static and dynamic, usually colors like static world, the new colors like dynamic elements, new colors will instantly become the focus while ordinary colors will not attract too much attention. For product design, you should aim for a continuous and integrated appearance of the elements, or avoid any interruptions or breaks. This includes the colors of the front panel, frame, and rear panel. For color itself, there are different levels of colors based on how often humans see them. The highest level color is the air, which is the most seen color by humans, but humans cannot make it. The closest thing to air is glass, which can create a 3D color effect by superimposing on other colors. This is a miracle that breaks the common sense that the eye can only see 2D colors. The second level color is the sky, which is the second most seen color by humans, especially during the day. The third level color is the human body, which is the most familiar color to humans, such as skin and hair. The fourth level color is nature, which is the second most familiar color to humans. The fifth level color is artificial. Monochrome is the cornerstone, and the color combination (the same color system can reduce the sense of abruptness, the near color secondary) and the gradient aesthetics are stricter. The more the style focuses on minimalism, the more it favors monochrome.

A person’s life is a bounded thing that must end. We will leave this earth with unfinished business. Regardless of the outcome of this writing project, I toyed with it long enough. I reconnoitered the world of fantasy and reality, manipulated ideas into sentences, and linked sentences into paragraphs. I peered into the past, weighed the present, and calculated the ramifications of living to experience the future. I told personal lies searching for universal truths and took ample liberty of the notion of an artistic license to make believe. I kicked the dirt, gazed into the sky, and sat under a tree waiting for inspiration. I examined my capacity for mental stagnation and self-deception. I meditated on the aesthetics of despair. I traveled many mental tributaries, and exhausted myself exploring worlds made of vapor. What I was once certain about I am now full of doubt. What I once doubted I now trust. I wrote the way a drunken man walks, rambling, staggering, jerking, and falling down. I retraced my steps to find my way back to the beginning, and erased my steps to arrive at the finale. Thankfully, the ending is coming, and I am finally ready.

Up ahead, a shadowy building loomed. It looked more like a gothic cathedral than a school, with grossly elongated black spires jutting into the night sky. They unnerved Tony. Somehow, they resembled horns silhouetted against the moon. He counted ten of these protuberances, each with an arrowhead as its tip. Tony found the structure difficult to make his mind up about. It was beautiful, that was for sure, but its beauty was intermingled with an ill-masked sense of horror. The black exterior had a pair of peculiar projections on either side of the building resembling a bat's wings. His feet on concrete now, he pulled up to a webbed gate— also reminiscent of a bats with the hind, bone-like array supporting an oily black, translucent texture. He saw some girls a few dozen feet from the gate at the entrance of the building. They were garbed in black sailor fuku skirts too high above the knees to facilitate concentration upon anything academic. The males were also dressed in black corduroy pants and black dress shirt. A throng by the massive doors stared holes through them as they approached. Up close, he noted some of the girls were quite pale, sporting piercings and tattoos on their necks and hands. He even saw one with a spider web inked on the side of her face. When he followed Silver Man into the building— his toes squeaking in his soaked shoes—he was awed by the aesthetics. There was a rather large gathering in the hall that looked more like large shadows with all the children in black. Tony felt out of place in his brown pants and long sleeved white shirt. The hall was bleak; the only source of illumination was a pair of horizontal cylindrical lamps set upon wooden rafters near the ceiling. Silver Man proceeded toward the platform where Tony could just make out the form of a thin man donning a monocle. He looked like an old scientist. He was sitting cross-legged, stroking his chest-length pearl white beard. The man appeared to be watching them as they progressed through the hall. Then he stood as they neared the stage, now caressing his bald head. He had a monkish appearance. His black robe— quite similar to the one Silver Man wore— was tied at the waist by a red cloth. The bald, monocled man extended a spindly hand which Silver Man gave a firm tug before leaning in and whispering something. The man nodded, turning to Tony. Tony flinched as he regarded him through his peculiar eyewear: a single gold-rimmed, circular lens. He now folded himself into an accentuated bow. "Listen up folks!" he shouted. Tony saw the students rushing inside the castle pell-mell, summoned by the voice of the bespectacled man. “We have a late recruit ladies and gentlemen,” the man said. His voice was much stronger than his thin frame suggested. “Join me as I induct him into the hallowed spirit of Imajinaereum.

At what point does the brown cloud over an industrial city become a problem as opposed to a sky-high banner proclaiming good times? When does the ration of clear-cuts and Christmas tree farms to healthy, intact forest begin to cause aesthetic and moral discomfort, or real environmental damage?

Tattoos are time stamps. That's why I don't believe in regrettable tattoos. I mean, shit, I've seen some pretty ugly ones and I'm glad I don't have any of those. But, really, as long as your tattoo looks nice and it aesthetically pleasing, then why regret it? It symbolizes a moment in your life in a world where everything passes us by in the blink of an eye. I think it's good to have these reminders to bring you back. Make you remember, reflect.

one must pause to observe that he might perhaps have done well, in choosing this comparison, to have reflected on the sheer strangeness, and significance, of the historical and cultural changes that made it possible in the first place for the death of a common man at the hands of a duly appointed legal authority to become the captivating center of an entire civilization’s moral and aesthetic contemplations—and for the deaths of all common men and women perhaps to be invested thereby with a gravity that the ancient order would never have accorded them. It seems to me that here, displayed with an altogether elegant incomprehensibility in Grayling’s casual juxtaposition of the sea-born goddess and the crucified god (who is a crucified man), one catches a glimpse of the enigma of the Christian event, which Nietzsche understood and Grayling sadly does not: the unanticipated lightning bolt that broke from the cloudless sky of pagan antiquity, the long revolution that overturned the hierarchies of heaven and earth alike. One does not have to believe any of it, of course—the Christian story, its moral claims, its metaphysical systems, and so forth. But anyone who chooses to lament that event should also be willing first to see this image of the God-man, broken at the foot of the cross, for what it is, in the full mystery of its historical contingency, spiritual pathos, and moral novelty: that tender agony of the soul that finds the glory of God in the most abject and defeated of human forms. Only if one has succeeded in doing this can it be of any significance if one still then elects to turn away.

Aymer turned towards the sea. There was a perfect panorama of chapel, town and harbour, with thinning wraiths of smoke haunting the sky in silent, crooked unison and the last remaining smudges of the snow slipping down those roofs that had no warming chimneys. Was this worthy of a sketch, a verse, an observation in his diary, Aymer wondered. What was that phrase he’d read that morning in dell‘Ova? He took the book from his pocket and found the passage: ‘The solitary Traveller has better company than those that voyage in the multitude, for he has Nature as his best Companion and no man can be lonely in its Assemblies of sky and earth and water, nor want of Friends.’ Aymer read this passage several times. It ought to comfort him, he thought. He was one of life’s ‘solitary travellers’ after all, a Radical, an aesthete and a bachelor. He didn’t voyage in the multitude. He knew that he was destined to a life alone. He looked for solace in the Assembly of sky and earth and water that was spread out before him. But there wasn’t any solace. He couldn’t fool himself. He’d rather be some cheerful low-jack, welcome at an inn, than the emperor of all this landscape

The starry sky began to shine,when assigned night spread with its ‘moon lamp’ for all of the wistful thoughts lay,below the tormented Earth’s nocturnal light and those splendid visions caught my pounding spirits.

VALLEY The valleys climb towards the sky in the early morning hours - seeking horizon's lines; More than the gravestones do with all the memory lined neatly up and half-forgotten - nearly washed away. Our sun is doomed to meet both.

3 A.M. SAINTS It is 3 a.m. again and you are showing me all of your sins by holding up your scars to the starless sky. Painting the entire universe with gold and clothing my velvet heart in purple - we become saints within those unholy hours close to dawn. Still, the world is spinning - even though it feels a little slower now - while the silence carries us away into the next day.

AMBER HEART'S Amber chases the night sky like the stars became fire and gold - and the moon is falling ever closer to the sun he loves so much; So there is not much pain with the world to share, yet we begin to doubt our love and forget our hearts need care. Still, we wish upon the stars to fall faster in love than we did out, so we won't try and pull back for broken hearts are heavy and hard to catch. So while the constellations fade and our souls disappear in their entanglement we hope to learn what it means to truly live again the least.

FLORENCE Soft emerald valleys lay in crimson light beneath the rolling hills; the waters of the Arno gleam like bronze the city's vein, so still. Each artist at the shore of the river stares in wonder and delight - how far do the lines reach across the bridge, beyond their work? One may seek rest under the cypresses and soft light of the August amber sun - here, at his grave, the city walls lay high around the garden, he knew once as paradise. His dark eyes still seem to pierce the lines of the hills, like he searches for his soul - still; (somewhere between the Arno and the nightfall). The trees - heavily laid with summer's fruit - stand high above the city in marble glance. Clear is now the dark sky - full of shards which dreamers call the stars.

OUR OLYMP At this altitude of wavering faith and dying stars our love could not stand a chance; it disappears slowly within my rhymes sky. Fading along the pale darkness like a path of crumbling anecdotes on old crumpled philosophers' notes. I can not see the moon anymore - neither I can imagine the place where it should rest tonight in the sky of ours, where it used to be so bright. The Gods themselves dare not make a home at this height of our hearts, for even the immortals would refuse to hold sacred a place so high. Even our wishes refuse to fall at the mountains feet, still climbing, trembling, and slowly loosing - defeat.

SAN GIMIGNANO The towers align the hills like crowns of heavy stones; Empty are the dreams of the ones that built them long ago. The thirst for power still stands frozen in its tracks - the only witnesses of it stand high against the silver sky. The distance gets smaller, and the towers become higher. So many have fallen, laying their family's name to rest, in gentle forgetfulness.

ATHENA They fall silently. the steps of her arrival - crossing snow so pale even the morning sky would fade into nightfall's amber; For she has entered the palace of gold - her hair braided with hope and tainted with red leaves which colours remind of a hanged man's rope - for her name is war and her crown is crafted out of grief.