Best Paganism Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

“When Christmas started in the fourth century, right in the middle of three Roman winter festivals, it was, from its very first moments, a winter party with Christian meanings added on top.”

“It is probable, as Anthony Faulkes suggests, that the pagan religion was never systematically understood by those who practiced it. Different areas of Scandinavia worshipped different gods at different times in the pre-Christian era; the localized nature of cults and rituals produced neither dogma nor sacred texts, as far as we know. Rather pre-Christian religion was 'a disorganized body of conflicting traditions that was probably never reduced in heathen times to a consistent orthodoxy such as Snorri attempts to present'.”

“Yes: I exist inside my body.”

“And I find a happiness in the fact of accepting —”

“If I could take a bite of the whole world”

“In Old High German and in Old English, geist and gaest did not designate a revenant as geist and ghost do today, and scato, "the shadow, did not apply to phantoms. We can deduce from this that revenants were not evanescent: they were not images or mists, but flesh and blood individuals, which is confirmed by the Norse literature and the rare texts from other Germanic countries.”

“I saw that there is no Nature,”

“He should be happy because he can think about the unhappiness of others!”

“The Amorous Shepherd is a fruitless interlude, but those few poems are among the world’s greatest love poems, because they’re love poems about love, not about being poems. The poet loves because he loves, not because love exists.”

“It’s stranger than every strangeness”

“I think about this, not like someone thinking, but like someone breathing,”

“If science wants to be truthful,”

“She’s a manner of speaking.”

“I’m glad I see with my eyes and not the pages I’ve read.”

“All the evil in the world comes from us bothering with each other,”

“Praise be to God I’m not good,”

“What does this think about that?”

“Between what i see in a field and what I see in another field”

“I was born subject like others to errors and defects,”

“Everything’s different from us. That’s why everything exists.”

“If I die very young, hear this:”

“When I’m depressed, I read Caeiro — he’s my fresh air. I become very calm, content, faithful — yes, I find faith in God, and in the soul’s transcendent living smallness, after reading the poems by that ungodly anti-humanist who goes unsurpassed on earth.”

“Things don’t have significance: they only have existence.”

“All beings exist and nothing else”

“A stagecoach passed by on the road and went on;”

“Also at times, on the surface of streams,”

“There are no roses in my yard: what wind brought you?”

“Those of us who embrace the feminine know its strength.”

“I don’t always feel what I know I should feel.”

“There’s enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything.”

“The man stopped talking and was looking at the sunset.”

“Live, you say, in the present;”

“...I don't believe in Him, and if He does exist, I don't like Him. His type of gods aren't gods who echo how mortals behave. They're gods who are held up as example of perfection to be emulated. They're not gods of the people. They're remote and inaccessible, they demand blind, unthinking obedience from their followers. They're dictators. We Aesir and Vanir, by contrast, are mirrors. Other gods rule. We reflect and magnify. We are you, only more so. We share your flaws and foibles. We are as humanlike as we are divine, and I think we are all the better for that.”

“A kid thinking about fairy tales and believing in fairy tales”

“And since today’s all there is for now, that’s everything.”

“Night doesn’t fall for my eyes”

“The 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.”

“I pass and I stay, like the Universe.”

“Even so, I’m somebody.”

“And I find a happiness in the fact of accepting —”

“If I could take a bite of the whole world”

“If I knew I was going to die tomorrow,”

“I'm one of my sensations.”

“Accept the universe”

“We are not on this planet to ask forgiveness of our deities”

“What comes, when it comes, will be what it is.”

“I consider a dream like I consider a shadow,” answered Caeiro, with his usual divine, unexpected promptitude. “A shadow is real, but it’s less real than a rock. A dream is real — if it weren’t, it wouldn’t be a dream — but less real than a thing. That’s what being real is like.”

“It’s the poet we love in Caeiro, not the philosopher. What we really get from these poems is a childlike sense of life, with all the direct materiality of the child’s mind, and all the vital spirituality of hope and increase that exist in the body and soul of nescient childhood. Caeiro’s work is a dawn that wakes us up and quickens us; a more that material, more than anti-spiritual dawn. It’s an abstract effect, pure vacuum, nothingness.”

“I don’t have a philosophy: I have senses...”