“People did not always love the mountains. Just a few hundred years ago the high mountains were regarded as horrible, monstrous places filling people with terror and fear. The inhabitants near them were seen as awful demons, subhumans. But this attitude got transformed into just the opposite, especially by Romantic writers and painters in the nineteenth century. Seen by the Romantics, high mountains became places of impossible beauty, where the quality of light and the expansive solitary grandeur of the high peaks opened the heart of the individual. A man climbing a mountain became the image of self-conscious intelligence pitted against the eternal indifference of the forces of nature. Compared to these forces of nature, we are nothing save for the will that moves our limbs. Only that will is truly our own.”

Pyrrho, 9.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 9: Uncategorized philosophers and Skeptics

Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

Interviewed on Otaku Mode https://otakumode.com/news/51a71457e918f6a32a072a6e/Interview-with-Director-Makoto-Shinkai-on-His-New-Work-ldquo-The-Garden-of-Words-rdquo-Vol-2
About The Garden of Words

The Princess Zoubaroff, Act I, sc. iv (1920), cited from Steven Moore (ed.) Complete Plays (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994) p. 55.

Pharaoh, Book X, line 688
The Odyssey : A Modern Sequel (1938)
Context: Fools, art is a heavy task, more heavy than gold crowns;
it's far more difficult to match firm words than armies,
they're disciplined troops, unconquered, to be placed in rhythm,
the mind's most mighty foe, and not disperse in air.
I'd give, believe me, a whole land for one good song,
for I know well that only words, that words alone,
like the high mountains, have no fear of age or death.

Source: Aleph

Describing the countryside around Chesapeake Bay (1606); reported in The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England & The Summer Isles (1907), vol. 2, pp. 44–45.

Jorn's quote, on the publication of the book Thidrek of Folk Art (1948)
1949 - 1958, Various sources

Notes on a postcard to Clara Schumann (12 September 1868)