One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth. - John Cowper Powys

"What is wrong with so many clever people to-day is the fatal distrust lodged in their minds — and lodged there by a superstitious awe in the presence of transitory scientific theories — of the power in their own souls. What we need — and the key to it lies in ourselves — is a bold return to the magical view of life. I don't mean to the magic of Madame Blavatsky, but to that kind of faith in the potentialities of the ego, with which all great poetry and all great philosophy has been concerned. That feeling of exultant liberation from the immediate pressure of practical life, which any "logos" from the arena of Goethe, of Spinoza, or Leonardo, or Plato, or Heraclitus, or Epictetus, or the old Chinese Taoists conveys, is what we need."

He wasn't an adventurer, he wasn't a rascally pilgarlic like one of those lean rogues lambasted in Rabelais who set their scurvy wits to deface, deflower, debauch and abduct, some sweet-blooded noble wench of an ancient breed.

What are they doing here, these difficult young persons and their still more difficult guardians? This — this sacred Elysian garden of the great humanistic tradition of classic wisdom and classic art — must not be invaded by clamorous babes and agitated elders, must not be profaned either by the plaudits or the strictures of the unlettered mob. Somewhere in human life, and where should it be if not in the cloistered seclusion of noble literature? — there must be an escape from the importunities of such people and from the responsibilities of the ignorance they so jealously guard.