From "Aniara", Harry Martinson (science fiction and poetry)

We're slowly coming to suspect that the space

we're traveling in is of a different sort

from what we thought whenever that word "space"

was decked out by our fantasies on Earth.

We're coming to suspect now that our drift

is even deeper then we first believed,

that knowledge is a blue naiveté

which with a measured quantity of insight

imagined that the Mystery has structure.

We now suspect that what we claim is space

and glassy clarity around Aniara’s hull

is spirit, everlasting and impalpable,

that we have strayed in spiritual seas.

The Dirt World (Paradises Lost, Ursula Le Guin)

To learn who we are, look not at history but at the arts, the record of our best, our genius. The elderly, sorrowful, Dutch faces gaze out of the darkness of a lost century. The mother’s beautiful grave head is bowed above the dead son who lies across her lap. The old mad king cries over his murdered daughter, “Never, never, never, never, never!” With infinite gentleness the Compassionate One murmurs, “It does not last, it cannot satisfy, it has no being.” “Sleep, sleep,” say the cradle songs, and “Set me free” cry the yearning slave-songs. The symphonies rise, a glory out of darkness. And the poets, the crazy poets cry out, “A terrible beauty is born.” But they’re all crazy. They’re all old and mad. All their beauty is terrible. Don’t read the poets. They don’t last, they can’t satisfy, they have no being. They wrote about another world, the dirt world.