“All the old bindings are broken. Cosmological centers now are any- and everywhere. The earth is a heavenly body, most beautiful of all, and all poetry now is archaic that fails to match the wonder of this view.”
Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By
“…it would be plain that this is what everybody wants, and everybody would regard it as the precise expression of the desire which he had long felt but had been unable to formulate, that he should melt into his beloved, and henceforth they would be one instead of two. The reason is that this was our primitive condition when we were wholes, and love is simply the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.”
Plato, The Symposium
“The smell of coffee had been like a spider web in the house. It had not been an easy smell. It had not lent itself to religious contemplation…”
Richard Brautigan, “Trout Fishing in America”
“But the reason Jefferson, throughout his long life, was carried away by such impracticabilities was that he knew, however dimly, that the Revolution, while it had given freedom to the people, had failed to provide a space where this freedom could be exercised. Only the representatives of the people, not the people themselves, had an opportunity to engage in those activities of “expressing, discussing and deciding” which in a positive sense are the activities of freedom.”
Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By
“…it would be plain that this is what everybody wants, and everybody would regard it as the precise expression of the desire which he had long felt but had been unable to formulate, that he should melt into his beloved, and henceforth they would be one instead of two. The reason is that this was our primitive condition when we were wholes, and love is simply the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole.”
Plato, The Symposium
“The smell of coffee had been like a spider web in the house. It had not been an easy smell. It had not lent itself to religious contemplation…”
Richard Brautigan, “Trout Fishing in America”
“But the reason Jefferson, throughout his long life, was carried away by such impracticabilities was that he knew, however dimly, that the Revolution, while it had given freedom to the people, had failed to provide a space where this freedom could be exercised. Only the representatives of the people, not the people themselves, had an opportunity to engage in those activities of “expressing, discussing and deciding” which in a positive sense are the activities of freedom.”
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution
“What of the future of rare native wildflowers?... …Birds are mobile; they can return easily to their niche. And some seeds have parachutes or are carried by birds. But what about the others? Can seeds remain viable in the soil for half a century or more, until succession renders their habitat suitable again? We know little about this.”
Roger Tory Peterson and Margaret McKenny, A Field Guide to Wildflowers
“But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of a wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers.”
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
“What of the future of rare native wildflowers?... …Birds are mobile; they can return easily to their niche. And some seeds have parachutes or are carried by birds. But what about the others? Can seeds remain viable in the soil for half a century or more, until succession renders their habitat suitable again? We know little about this.”
Roger Tory Peterson and Margaret McKenny, A Field Guide to Wildflowers
“But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of a wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers.”
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
“Rather than speak of my certainties – I have so few and they are of so personal a nature – I prefer to tell you of my efforts to acquire them. I write to understand as much as to be understood. Reflected in all my characters and their mirror games, it is always the Jew in me trying to find himself.”
Elie Wiesel, One Generation After
“Time, within him, had become as small as a heartbeat, as large as death. He was no longer hungry or thirsty; he no longer desired children and a wife. His whole soul squeezed into his eyes. He saw – that was all: he saw.”
Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ
“I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance”
e.e. cummings, Love and Its Mysteries
“But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave”
Milan Kundera, The Incredible Lightness of Being
Elie Wiesel, One Generation After
“Time, within him, had become as small as a heartbeat, as large as death. He was no longer hungry or thirsty; he no longer desired children and a wife. His whole soul squeezed into his eyes. He saw – that was all: he saw.”
Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ
“I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance”
e.e. cummings, Love and Its Mysteries
“But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave”
Milan Kundera, The Incredible Lightness of Being
“Our mothers, unlike their white counterparts, had to try and make a home in the midst of a racist world that had already sealed our fate, an unequal world waiting to tell us we were inferior, not smart enough, unworthy of love. Against this backdrop where blackness was not loved, our mothers had the task of making a home.”
Bell Hooks, Salvation
“All creatures are involved in the life of all others, consequently every species… all nature is in a perpetual state of flux. Every animal is more or less a human being, every mineral more or less a plant, every plant more or less an animal… There is nothing clearly defined in nature. “
Denis Diderot, D’Alembert’s Nephew
“Probabilistically speaking, it is mind-bogglingly more likely that everything we now see in the universe arose from a rare but every-so-often expectable statistical aberration away from total disorder, rather than having slowly evolved from the even more unlikely, the incredibly more ordered, the astoundingly low-entropy starting point required by the big bang.
Yet, when we went with the odds and imagined that everything popped into existence by a statistical fluke, we found ourselves in a quagmire: that route called into question the laws of physics themselves. And so we are inclined to buck the bookies and go with a low-entropy big bang as the explanation of the arrow of time. The puzzle then is to explain how the universe began in such an unlikely, highly ordered configuration. That is the question to which the arrow of time points.”
Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos
“Needless to say, not one dime has been spent conducting research or medical follow up on any of the 458,290 Americans that the Department of Energy lists as having been present at one or more of the atmospheric bomb tests.”
Michel Uhl and Tod Ensign, GI Guinea Pigs
“Today I mourn him, as I can,
By leaving in their golden leaves
Some luscious apples overhead.
Now may my abstinence restore
Peace to the orchard and the dead.
We shall not nag them anymore.”
James Wright, An Offering for Mr. Bluehart
“From having all these and other feelings I noted that the interior prayer bears fruit in three ways: in the Spirit, in the feelings, and in revelations.”
The Way of a Pilgrim (translated by RM French)
“We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens. We are ready to hang, electrocute, or lynch anyone, who, from economic necessity, will risk his own life in the attempt upon that of some industrial magnate. Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that it will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations.”
Emma Goldman, Patriotism
“Those that desire the life of this world with all its frippery shall be rewarded for their deeds in their own lifetime and nothing shall be denied them. These are the men who in the world to come shall be rewarded with hell-fire. Fruitless are their deeds, and vain are their works.””
The Koran
“I think it is imperative that feminists dismantle the institutions that foster the exploitation and abuse of women. The family, conventional sexuality, and gender are at the tops of my hit list. These institutions control the emotional, intimate lives of every one of us, and they have done incalculable damage to women.”
Pat Califia, Feminism and Sadomasochism
“Ah, demoniac madness! He rages most of all at the thought that eternity might get it into its head to take his misery away from him”
Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
“This is like rejecting the notion that a Heaven lies someplace beyond the end of the path of life. Heaven, so to speak, lies waiting for us through life, ready to step into for a time and to enjoy before we have to come back to our ordinary life of striving. And once we have been in It, we can remember it forever, and feed ourselves on this memory and be sustained in time of stress.”
Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being
“Whatever such a mind sees is a flower, and whatever such a mind dreams of is the moon. It is only a barbarous mind that sees other than a flower, merely an animal mind that dreams of other than the moon. The first lesson for the artist is, therefore, to learn how to overcome such barbarism and animality, to follow nature, to be one with nature.”
Basho, The Records of a Travel-worn Satchel
“The otter is agile, fluid in its movements as the water that is its favorite element. Yet on land it is not as light on its feet as the weasel or marten and seems almost to plow through the snow. This is revealed by its tracks, which sometimes appear in a snowy trough. Characteristic too, is the long mark in the snow where the otter has slid. Coasting is enjoyed occasionally by the mink, but the sport is developed to the extreme by the otter.”
Olaus J. Murie, A Field Guide to Animal Tracks
“A genuine old-fashioned barbecue is as fascinating and as gay as a strawberry festival. The big ones seem to be getting more and more scarce, just as the strawberry social with Japanese lanterns and pink crepe paper seems to be giving way to more exciting refreshments and boogie woogie.”
James Beard, Cook it Outdoors
“There can never be a single story. There are only ways of seeing.”
Arundhati Roy, War Talk
“Many, again, having observed in others or experienced in themselves elevated feelings which they imagine incapable of emanating from any other source than religion, have an honest aversion to anything tending, as they think, to dry up the fountain of such feelings. They, therefore, either dislike and disparage all philosophy or addict themselves with intolerant zeal to those forms of it in which intuition usurps the place of evidence and internal feeling is made the test of objective truth”
John Stuart Mill, The Nature and Utility of Religion
“Blessed are you whose worthiness gives scope,
Being had, to triumph, being lack’d, to hope.”
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 52
“Look, I admit I find this man’s supposed bisexuality confusing and I don’t quite believe it. But what are my options? A two-minute roll in the hay with you, where you make no distinction between sexual intercourse and push-ups; and then a happy evening of admiring your underarm hair and your belt buckles?”
Christopher Durang; Prudence, from the play “Beyond Therapy”
“Dogmatism reveals itself not only by its inability to conceive the inward or implicit illimitability of the symbol, the universality that resolves all outward oppositions, but also by its inability to recognize, when faced with two apparently contradictory truths, the inward connection they implicitly affirm, a connection that makes them complimentary aspects of the same truth.”
Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions
“A Jewish Merchant, on a ship off the coast, observed the Crusader siege of Acre and described it to his mother in a letter: ‘I arrived in Palestine before Acre was conquered and therefore witnessed the vicissitudes of the siege. We constantly faced the danger of death, for we were near [the Crusaders] day and night, hearing their talk as they heard ours, and our bread was colored with blood’”
from Joel Kraemer’s “Maimonides; The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Great Minds”
“It grieved Whitman – as it did Lawrence – that there was no open, legitimate way to express love for a man, but it makes no difference to our understanding of him to know whether or not he went to bed with men. The secret shameful things that he feared in himself were incorporated in his store of sensual delights. Outwardly they seemed unexpressed. The blossom of his body’s shamefulness was a terrible beauty to him, part of his revolutionary inner life. “
Philip Callow, From Noon to Starry Night; a Life of Walt Whitman
“Through the thin red silk my cool flesh glistens
lustrous as snow fresh with fragrance.
With a smile I say to my beloved:
‘Tonight, inside the mesh curtains, the pillow and mat are cool.’”
Li Ch’ing-chao, Tune: Song of Picking Mulberry (Translated by Eugene Eoyang)
“The world was divided into two parties which were trying to destroy each other because they both wanted the same thing, the liberation of the oppressed, the abolition of violence, and the establishment of lasting peace. On both sides there was strong sentiment against any peace that might not last forever – if eternal peace was not to be had, both parties were committed to eternal war, and the insouciance with which the military balloons rained their blessings from prodigious heights on just and unjust alike reflected the inner spirit of this war to perfection. In other respects, however, it was being waged in the old way, with enormous but inadequate resources… …for in the meantime the intellectuals, visionaries, poets and dreamers had gradually lost interest in the war, and with only soldiers and technicians to count on, the military art made little progress.”
Hermann Hesse, If the War Goes On Another Two Years
“I have been thinking of the difference
between water
and the waves on it. Rising,
water’s still water, falling back,
it is water, will you give me a hint
how to tell them apart?”
Kabir, Forty-Four of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir; Versions by Robert Bly
“I like my life and I am satisfied with it. I am not in need of any additional gilding of it. Life without privacy and without obscurity, life reflected in the splendor of a plate glass show case is inconceivable to me.”
Boris Pasternak; I Remember
Bell Hooks, Salvation
“All creatures are involved in the life of all others, consequently every species… all nature is in a perpetual state of flux. Every animal is more or less a human being, every mineral more or less a plant, every plant more or less an animal… There is nothing clearly defined in nature. “
Denis Diderot, D’Alembert’s Nephew
“Probabilistically speaking, it is mind-bogglingly more likely that everything we now see in the universe arose from a rare but every-so-often expectable statistical aberration away from total disorder, rather than having slowly evolved from the even more unlikely, the incredibly more ordered, the astoundingly low-entropy starting point required by the big bang.
Yet, when we went with the odds and imagined that everything popped into existence by a statistical fluke, we found ourselves in a quagmire: that route called into question the laws of physics themselves. And so we are inclined to buck the bookies and go with a low-entropy big bang as the explanation of the arrow of time. The puzzle then is to explain how the universe began in such an unlikely, highly ordered configuration. That is the question to which the arrow of time points.”
Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos
“Needless to say, not one dime has been spent conducting research or medical follow up on any of the 458,290 Americans that the Department of Energy lists as having been present at one or more of the atmospheric bomb tests.”
Michel Uhl and Tod Ensign, GI Guinea Pigs
“Today I mourn him, as I can,
By leaving in their golden leaves
Some luscious apples overhead.
Now may my abstinence restore
Peace to the orchard and the dead.
We shall not nag them anymore.”
James Wright, An Offering for Mr. Bluehart
“From having all these and other feelings I noted that the interior prayer bears fruit in three ways: in the Spirit, in the feelings, and in revelations.”
The Way of a Pilgrim (translated by RM French)
“We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens. We are ready to hang, electrocute, or lynch anyone, who, from economic necessity, will risk his own life in the attempt upon that of some industrial magnate. Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that it will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations.”
Emma Goldman, Patriotism
“Those that desire the life of this world with all its frippery shall be rewarded for their deeds in their own lifetime and nothing shall be denied them. These are the men who in the world to come shall be rewarded with hell-fire. Fruitless are their deeds, and vain are their works.””
The Koran
“I think it is imperative that feminists dismantle the institutions that foster the exploitation and abuse of women. The family, conventional sexuality, and gender are at the tops of my hit list. These institutions control the emotional, intimate lives of every one of us, and they have done incalculable damage to women.”
Pat Califia, Feminism and Sadomasochism
“Ah, demoniac madness! He rages most of all at the thought that eternity might get it into its head to take his misery away from him”
Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
“This is like rejecting the notion that a Heaven lies someplace beyond the end of the path of life. Heaven, so to speak, lies waiting for us through life, ready to step into for a time and to enjoy before we have to come back to our ordinary life of striving. And once we have been in It, we can remember it forever, and feed ourselves on this memory and be sustained in time of stress.”
Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being
“Whatever such a mind sees is a flower, and whatever such a mind dreams of is the moon. It is only a barbarous mind that sees other than a flower, merely an animal mind that dreams of other than the moon. The first lesson for the artist is, therefore, to learn how to overcome such barbarism and animality, to follow nature, to be one with nature.”
Basho, The Records of a Travel-worn Satchel
“The otter is agile, fluid in its movements as the water that is its favorite element. Yet on land it is not as light on its feet as the weasel or marten and seems almost to plow through the snow. This is revealed by its tracks, which sometimes appear in a snowy trough. Characteristic too, is the long mark in the snow where the otter has slid. Coasting is enjoyed occasionally by the mink, but the sport is developed to the extreme by the otter.”
Olaus J. Murie, A Field Guide to Animal Tracks
“A genuine old-fashioned barbecue is as fascinating and as gay as a strawberry festival. The big ones seem to be getting more and more scarce, just as the strawberry social with Japanese lanterns and pink crepe paper seems to be giving way to more exciting refreshments and boogie woogie.”
James Beard, Cook it Outdoors
“There can never be a single story. There are only ways of seeing.”
Arundhati Roy, War Talk
“Many, again, having observed in others or experienced in themselves elevated feelings which they imagine incapable of emanating from any other source than religion, have an honest aversion to anything tending, as they think, to dry up the fountain of such feelings. They, therefore, either dislike and disparage all philosophy or addict themselves with intolerant zeal to those forms of it in which intuition usurps the place of evidence and internal feeling is made the test of objective truth”
John Stuart Mill, The Nature and Utility of Religion
“Blessed are you whose worthiness gives scope,
Being had, to triumph, being lack’d, to hope.”
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 52
“Look, I admit I find this man’s supposed bisexuality confusing and I don’t quite believe it. But what are my options? A two-minute roll in the hay with you, where you make no distinction between sexual intercourse and push-ups; and then a happy evening of admiring your underarm hair and your belt buckles?”
Christopher Durang; Prudence, from the play “Beyond Therapy”
“Dogmatism reveals itself not only by its inability to conceive the inward or implicit illimitability of the symbol, the universality that resolves all outward oppositions, but also by its inability to recognize, when faced with two apparently contradictory truths, the inward connection they implicitly affirm, a connection that makes them complimentary aspects of the same truth.”
Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions
“A Jewish Merchant, on a ship off the coast, observed the Crusader siege of Acre and described it to his mother in a letter: ‘I arrived in Palestine before Acre was conquered and therefore witnessed the vicissitudes of the siege. We constantly faced the danger of death, for we were near [the Crusaders] day and night, hearing their talk as they heard ours, and our bread was colored with blood’”
from Joel Kraemer’s “Maimonides; The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Great Minds”
“It grieved Whitman – as it did Lawrence – that there was no open, legitimate way to express love for a man, but it makes no difference to our understanding of him to know whether or not he went to bed with men. The secret shameful things that he feared in himself were incorporated in his store of sensual delights. Outwardly they seemed unexpressed. The blossom of his body’s shamefulness was a terrible beauty to him, part of his revolutionary inner life. “
Philip Callow, From Noon to Starry Night; a Life of Walt Whitman
“Through the thin red silk my cool flesh glistens
lustrous as snow fresh with fragrance.
With a smile I say to my beloved:
‘Tonight, inside the mesh curtains, the pillow and mat are cool.’”
Li Ch’ing-chao, Tune: Song of Picking Mulberry (Translated by Eugene Eoyang)
“The world was divided into two parties which were trying to destroy each other because they both wanted the same thing, the liberation of the oppressed, the abolition of violence, and the establishment of lasting peace. On both sides there was strong sentiment against any peace that might not last forever – if eternal peace was not to be had, both parties were committed to eternal war, and the insouciance with which the military balloons rained their blessings from prodigious heights on just and unjust alike reflected the inner spirit of this war to perfection. In other respects, however, it was being waged in the old way, with enormous but inadequate resources… …for in the meantime the intellectuals, visionaries, poets and dreamers had gradually lost interest in the war, and with only soldiers and technicians to count on, the military art made little progress.”
Hermann Hesse, If the War Goes On Another Two Years
“I have been thinking of the difference
between water
and the waves on it. Rising,
water’s still water, falling back,
it is water, will you give me a hint
how to tell them apart?”
Kabir, Forty-Four of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir; Versions by Robert Bly
“I like my life and I am satisfied with it. I am not in need of any additional gilding of it. Life without privacy and without obscurity, life reflected in the splendor of a plate glass show case is inconceivable to me.”
Boris Pasternak; I Remember
Posts
