"We have to give up being understood, being understood is not necessary."
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Strength through revolutionary asceticism
We have a task. The question is only whether we are capable of being this task itself; every German soldier has fallen in vain if we do not hourly strive for the rescuing of a beginning of the German essence, beyond the now quite released and definitive self-devastation of all modern humanity.
Heidegger, Black Notebooks
The mountains look on Marathon --
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream'd that Greece might yet be free
For, standing on the Persians' grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.
...
Must we but weep o'er days more blest?
Must we but blush? – Our fathers bled.
Earth! render back from out thy breast
A remnant of our Spartan dead!
Of the three hundred grant but three,
To make a new Thermopylae.
Byron, The Isles of Greece
Plutarch, Marius
“At [Dionysus’] conception the earthly was touched by the splendor of divine heaven. But in this union of the heavenly with the earthly, which is expressed in the myth of the double birth, man’s tear-filled lot was not dissolved but preserved, rather in sharp contrast to superhuman majesty. He who was born in this way is not only the exultant god, the god who brings man joy. He is the suffering and dying god, the god of tragic contrast. And the inner force of this dual reality is so great that he appears among men like a storm, he staggers them, and he tames their opposition with the whip of madness. All tradition, all order must be shattered. Life becomes suddenly an ecstaty—an ecstasy of blessedness, but an ecstasy, no less, of terror.”
— Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult