Free Online Quotations. Spiritual Thought. Universal Mind.

Quotes

Ultram Bibis?
Aquam an undam?

A man must find his
occasions in himself, it is
true.

Thoreau

We are but whirlpools in
a river of ever-flowing
water. We are not the
stuff that abides, but
patterns that perpetuate
themselves.

Norbert Wiener

Rushing into action, you fail.
Trying to grasp things, you
lose them.
Therefore the master takes
action by letting things take
their course.
She remains as calm at the
end as the beginning.

Tao Te Ching

But to disappear with the wandering
clouds . . .
--And to be blessed by the cool . . .
And to die with these damp violets
that dawn dumps in the woods?

Rimbaud

This shows that every individual is a tone, a rhythm: a tone which draws the
tone of every other person to its own pitch; a rhythm which compels every other
person to follow the same rhythm.
Hazrat Khan

He was an extraordinary
sacred manipulator,
practicing a shamanism of
words.
Mondzain

For it was not only a man like himself who saw what was true, the
thing we are all in need of; innumerable other people also think
themselves in possession of it.

Musil

My life is an
intermission with band
music.

Fernando Pessoa

Time and patience turn the
mulberry leaf to silk.

Serbian proverb

A
lovely
woman

tapers
off
into a
fish.
Horace
(qtd.
Montai
gne)

That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy.
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

William Blake

The story of the loss and regaining of identity is, I
think, the framework of all literature.

N.Frye

Return to Home

Transference is that set of ways of perceiving and responding to
the world which is developed in childhood and which is usually
entirely appropriate to the childhood environment (indeed, often
life-saving) but which is inappropriately transferred into the adult
environment.

                               M. Scott Peck

The literary writer isn't giving information either about a subject or
about his state of mind: he's trying to let something take on its own
form . . . .
N. Frye

The nature of my work is
visionary or imaginative; it is an
attempt to restore what the
ancients called the Golden Age.

William Blake

It is not correlative with wonder; for
wonder is our relation to things
which we are conscious of not quite
understanding or at any rate of
understanding less than we had
thought. It arises from contact with
a different kind of consciousness
from our own, different, yet not so
remote that we cannot partly share
it, as indeed in such a convention,
the mere word "contact" implies.
Strangeness, in fact, arouses
wonder when we do not
understand, aesthetic imagination
when we do.

Owen Barfield

Verum Factum

What is true for us is what we have made.

Experience is of the particular and the
unique, and takes place in time;
knowledge is of the universal and the
assimilated, and contains an element
withdrawn from time.

N. Frye

The lightening flashes
of identity between
subject and object is
the attribute of genius.

Jules LaForque

At last true words surge up from deep within our breast,
The mask is snatched away, reality is left.
Lucretius (qtd. Montaigne)

When death comes, let it find me at my work.
Ovid (qtd. Montaigne)

For in truth habit is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress.
Montaigne

Habit is the most effective teacher of all things.
Pliny (qtd. Montaigne)

But literary artifice is the only means that a writer has at his
disposal. How else can he convey his impression of life?
Precisely by discrediting those means, by repudiating that air of
bookishness in which any book is inevitably wrapped. When
Pascal observed that the true eloquence makes fun of
eloquence, he succinctly formulated the principle that could
look to Cervantes as its recent and striking exemplar. It
remained for La Rochefoucauld to restate the other side of the
paradox: some people would never have loved had they not
heard of love.

Harry Levin

Epicurus says that being rich is not an alleviation, but a change, of troubles.
Montaigne

The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which He sees
me.

Angelus Silsius (qtd. Roland Barthes)

To evoke in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors,
sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that
others may experience the same feeling--this is the activity of art.

A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the perceiver, the
separation between himself and the artist--not that alone, but also
between himself and all whose minds perceive this work of art. In this
freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this
uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great
attractive force of art.

Leo Tolstoy, from the essay "What is Art?"

I hate men base in deeds but wise in words.
Pacuvius (qtd. Montaigne)

Our own trust generally wins the trust of others.
Livy (qtd. Montaigne)

They have learned to speak among others, not with themselves.
Cicero (qtd. Montaigne)

By willing, one weakens. Besides this, a balance between activity and
repose is necessary.
Hazrat Khan

Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life.
If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know where we are, and
if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to
get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost . . .
The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and
more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort .
. . the biggest problem of map-making is not that we have to start from
scratch, but that if our maps are to be accurate we have to continually revise
them. The world itself is constantly changing. Glaciers come, glaciers go.
Cultures come, cultures go. There is too little technology, there is too much
technology. Even more dramatically, the vantage point from which we view
the world is constantly and rapidly changing. When we are children we are
dependent, powerless. As adults we may be powerful. Yet in illness or
infirm old age we may become powerless and dependent again . . . The
process of making revisions, particularly major revisions, is painful,
sometimes excruciatingly painful. And herein lies the major source of many
of the ills of mankind.
M.
Scott Peck, from The Road Less Travelled

The second step requires that I go
beyond the idiosyncratic and
egocentric perception of immediate
experience. Mature awareness is
possible only when I have digested
and compensated for the biases and
prejudices that are the residue of my
personal history. Awareness of what
presents itself to me involves a
double movement of attention:
silencing the familiar and welcoming
the strange. Each time I approach a
strange object, person, or event, I
have a tendency to let my present
needs, past experience, or
expectations for the future determine
what I will see. If I am to appreciate
the uniqueness of any datum, I must
be sufficiently aware of my
preconceived ideas and characteristic
emotional distortions to bracket them
long enough to welcome strangeness
and novelty into my perceptual world.
This discipline of bracketing,
compensating, or silencing requires
sophisticated self-knowledge and
courageous honesty. Yet, without
this discipline each present moment
is only the repetition of something
already experienced. In order for
genuine novelty to emerge, for the
unique presence of things, persons,
or events to take root in me, I must
undergo a decentralization of the ego.

Sam Keen, from To a Dancing God

The two--the hero and his ultimate god, the seeker and the
found--are thus understood as the outside and the inside of a
single, self-mirrored mystery, which is identical with the mystery
of the manifest world. The great deed of the supreme hero is to
come to the knowledge of this unity in multiplicity and then to
make it known.
Joseph Campbell

Today our mind is in us; in the hereafter we shall
be in our mind. Therefore what is mind just now,
in the hereafter will be the world. If it is heaven,
it will be heaven; if it is another place, it will be
another place. It is what we have made it.

Hazrat Khan

From Montaigne's "On Solitude"

Remember the man who, when asked why he took so much pains
in art which could come to the knowledge of so few people, replied:

"Few are enough for me, one is enough for me, none at all is
enough for me."

He spoke truly: you and one companion are an adequate theatre
for each other, or you for yourself.

Let the people be one to you, and let one be a whole people to
you. It is a base ambition to want to derive glory from our
idleness and concealment. We must do like the animals that rub
out their tracks at the entrance to their lairs.

From Proust "Combray" Vol. I In Search of Lost Time

The walls of houses, the Tansonville hedge, the trees of Roussainville wood, the
bushes adjoining Montjouvain, all must bear the blows of my walking-stick or
umbrella, must hear my shouts of happiness, these being no more than
expressions of the confused ideas which exhilarated me, and which had not
achieved the repose of enlightenment, preferring the pleasures of a lazy drift
toward an immediate outlet rather than submit to a slow and difficult course of
elucidation.

Thus it is that most of our attempts to translate our innermost feelings do no
more than relieve us of them by drawing them out in a blurred form which does
not help us to identify them.

Eternity is in love with the productions of
time.

Blake (qtd. N.Frye)

From Northorope Frye's Words with Power

Buber's I and Thou tells us that we are all
imprisoned in an 'IT' world which is really a
reflection of ourselves. The world of 'IT'
includes nature and the physical
environment, but it also includes the social
world, 'he' and 'she' being aspects of 'IT' in
this context. Creation, in this view, is
intelligible because it reflects our minds; the
world is beautiful because it reflects our
emotions. Only a 'Thou', who is both
another person and the identity of
ourselves, releases the ability to love that
gets us out of the world of shades and
echoes (Echo was the mistress of
Narcissus, and his aural counterpart) into
the world of sunlight and freedom.

From In Search of Lost Time Vol. II by Marcel Proust

The true variety is in this abundance of real and unexpected elements, in the branch loaded
with blue flowers which shoots up, against all reason, from the spring hedgerow that seemed
already overcharged with blossoms, whereas the purely formal imitation of variety (and one
might advance the same argument for all the other qualities of style) is but a barren
uniformity, this is to say, the very antithesis of variety, and cannot, in the work of imitators,
give the illusion or recall the memory of it save to a reader who has not acquired the sense of
it from the masters themselves.

But the magic stillness in the prose, its easy motion, depends upon its calm and
measured breathing, its quiet but ever present music, its unhurried and
appreciative perceptions, like a slow swallow of wine.
William H. Gass

Song is miraculous because it masters what is otherwise a pure
instrument of self-seeking, the human voice.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal

We cannot live because of our wound (the tragic flaw at the center that
seems to be keeping us from our life) but we cannot die because of our
unfinished dream.

Richard Rohr

Examine this region
Of short distances and definite places.

"In Praise of Limestone"
W.H. Auden

A Caution to Poets

What poets feel not, when they make
A pleasure in creating,
The world, in its turn, will not take
Pleasure in contemplating.

Mathew Arnold

How many books do we read from which the writer lacked the
courage to tie off the umbilical cord? How many gifts do we
open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag?
Is it pertinent, is it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the
writer personally?

Annie Dillard, from The Writing Life

Also from Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

When you write, you lay out a line of words. The
line of words is a miner's pick, a wood-carver's
gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs
a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in a
new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located
the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this
time next year. (pg.3)

The written word is weak. Many people prefer life
to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good.
Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It
appeals only to the subtlest senses--the
imagination's vision, and the imagination's
hearing--and the moral sense, and the intellect.
This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so
rocks and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing
next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.
The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to
the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written. An
ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a
thing; it will take half an hour to pick up the
writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds
and softs. (pg. 17)

Annie Dillard quoting Thoreau,

The youth gets together his
materials to build a bridge to
the moon, or perchance a
palace or temple on the earth,
and at length the middle-aged
man concludes to build a
wood-shed with them.

Academics, like other people, start with a personality that is afflicted by ignorance
and prejudice, and try to escape from that personality, in Eliot's phrase, through
absorption in impersonal scholarship.

Northrope Frye

According to the second Law of Thermodynamics, much work was required to resist
the tyranny of the probable--to force the atoms of a metal to behave themselves.

Jonathan Franzen, from The Corrections

Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life . . . know your own bone:
gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still.

Thoreau (qtd. Annie Dillard)

John Gardner, From The Art of Fiction

Good description does far more than
that: It is one of the writer's means of
reaching down into his unconscious
mind, finding clues to what questions
his fiction must ask, and, with luck,
hints about the answers. Good
description is symbolic not because
the writer plants symbols in it but
because, by working in the proper
way, he forces symbols still largely
mysterious to him up into his
conscious mind where, little by little,
as his fiction progresses, he can work
with them and finally understand them.

To put this another way, the organized
and intelligent fictional dream that will
eventually fill the reader's mind begins
as a largely mysterious dream in the
writer's mind. Through the process of
writing, and endless revising, the writer
makes available the order the reader
sees. Discovering the meaning and
communicating the meaning are for he
writer one single act. One does not
simply describe a barn, then. One
describes a barn as seen by someone
in a particular mood, because only in
that way can the barn or the writer's
experience of barns, combined with
whatever lies deepest in his
feelings--be tricked into mumbling its
secrets.

Northrope Frye

From The Great Code

As nothing is certain or
permanent in the world,
nothing either real or unreal,
the secret of wisdom is
detachment without withdrawal.
All goals and aims may cheat
us, but if we run away from
them we shall find ourselves
bumping into them.

As soon as we renounce the
expectation of reward, in
however refined a guise, for
virtue or wisdom, we relax and
our real energies begin to flow
into the soul.

We see too how the primitive
form of wisdom, using past
experience as a balancing pole
for walking the tightrope of life,
finally grows, through incessant
discipline and practice, into the
final freedom of movement,
where, in Yeat's phrase, we can
no longer tell the dancer from
the dance.

Remember: it is the form that matters, not
the content. The less your targets focus on
what you say, and the more on how it
makes them feel, the more seductive the
effect.

Robert Greene, The Art of Seduction

From Theodor Reik's Of Love and Lust

originally quoted in The Art of Seduction
"The normal rhythm of life oscillates in general between a mild satisfaction with oneself
and a slight discomfort, originating in the knowledge of one's personal shortcomings. We
should like to be as handsome, young, strong, or clever as other people of our
acquaintance. We wish we could achieve as much as they do, long for similar
advantages, positions, the same or greater success. To be delighted with oneself is the
exception, and, often enough, a smoke screen which we produce for ourselves and of
course for others. Somewhere in it is a lingering feeling of discomfort with ourselves and
a slight self-dislike. I assert this spirit of discontent renders a person especially
susceptible to "falling in love" . . . In most cases this attitude of disquiet is unconscious,
but in some it reaches the threshold of awareness in the form or a slight uneasiness, or a
stagnant dissatisfaction, or a realization of being upset without knowing why."

All things that are,
Are with more spirit chased than enjoyed.

O, ten times faster Venus' pigeons fly
To seal love's bonds new made, than they are wont
To keep obliged faith un forfeited.

Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice"

More quotes from Robert Greene's The Art of Seduction

"Do not waste time on real information; focus on feelings and
sensations, using expressions that are ripe with connotation. Plant
ideas by dropping hints, writing suggestively without explaining
yourself."

"Never lecture, never seem intellectual or superior--you will only
make yourself pompous, which is deadly. Far better to speak
colloquially, though with a poetic edge to lift the language above the
commonplace. Do not become sentimental--it is tiring, and too
direct."

"The goal of your writing is not to express yourself but to create
emotion in the reader, spreading confusion and desire."

Far from seeking a single and
complete experience, the postmodern
object strives toward an encyclopedic
condition, allowing a myriad of access
points, and an infinitude of interpretive
responses.

Howard Fox

(qtd. in Postmodernist Culture by Steven Connor 1989)

To step into the infinite it
suffices to penetrate the
finite in all its aspects.
Ernst Cassirer (qtd. William H. Gass)

We are all vaguely tormented with a
desire to know a world which appears to
us a dungeon . . . I should feel as if
I could not depart in peace out of this
narrow sphere unless I endeavored to
explore my prison. The more I examine
it, the more beautiful and extensive it
becomes in my eyes.

Astolphe de Custine
(qtd. Michael Kimmelman)

A pox on all captivity, even should it be in interest of
the universal good, even in Montezuma's gardens of
precious stones! Still today I am only counting on
what comes of my own openness, my eagerness to
wander in search of everything, which, I am
confident, keeps me in mysterious communication
with other beings, as if we were suddenly called to
assemble. I would like my life to leave after it no
other murmur than that of a watchman's song, of a
song to while away the waiting. Independent of
what happens and what does not happen, the wait
itself is magnificent.

Andre Breton
From L' Amour fou (Mad Love) 1937

Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented. Sometimes am I king;
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar, and so I am.
Then crushing penury persuades me I was better when a king;
Then I am kinged again, and by and by
Think that I am unkinged by Bullingbrooke, and straight am nothing.
But what e'er I be, nor I, nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased with being nothing.

Richard II Act 5 Scene 5
Shakespeare

Let us be respectfully
reminded:

Life and death are of
supreme importance.
Time swiftly passes by
and with it our only
chance.
Each of us must
aspire to awaken.
Be Aware: Do not
squander your life.

The Anglo-American poetic tradition in this century, however, has been essentially
post-Romantic, an ironic subversion of many of the large, emotional, philosophical, and
rhetorical notes and gestures of the Romantics.

Eamon Grennan

If you run after things, nothing will come to
you. Let things run after you. The sea never
sends an invitation to the rivers. That's why
they run to the sea. The sea is content. It
doesn't want anything. That's the secret in
life.

Swami Satchidananda
(qtd. John Perry Barlow)

Basho (1644-1694)

pen name for Matsuo Basho, Japanese Poet

Bash gave this advice to his disciplines:

"Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if
you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must let go of
your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose
yourself on the object and don't learn. Your poetry arises by itself when
you and the object become one, when you have plunged deep enough into
the object to see something like a hidden light glimmering there. However
well-phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling isn't natural--if you and
the object are seperate--then your poetry isn't true poetry but merely your
subjective counterfeit."

Qtd. in The Enlightened Heart ed. Stephen Mitchel

Life in the world of the red dust
contains within itself the very quality
of unreality that, seen by the Stone's
incarnation as one long series of
losses and disillusionments, can
produce the detachment necessary for
transcendence.

Dore J. Levy
Ideal and Actual in The Story of the
Stone

In the friendship I speak of our souls mingle and blend with each other so
completely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it
again.
Montaigne

You don't delve deeply enough into the
intimacies of form. You don't pursue them
with sufficient love and perseverance in all
their disguises and evasions. Beauty is
something difficult and austere which can't be
captured that way: you must bide your time,
lie in wait, seize it, hug it close with all your
might in order to make it yield. Form's a
Proteus much more elusive and resourceful
than the one in the myth--only after a long
struggle can you compel it to reveal to its true
aspect. Artists like you are satisfied with the
first likeness it yields, or at most the second or
third; that's not the way this victory is won!
The victorious painter is never deceived by all
those subterfuges, he perseveres until Nature's
forced to show herself stark naked, in her true
spirit.

From The Unknown Masterpiece

Honore de Balzac

From John Blofeld's Introduction to The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain

To those familiar with Taoist teaching, it meant the invisible, formless matrix
that gives rise to the endless succession of forms which are no more apart
from or different from the matrix than waves are apart from or different from
the sea.

The use of a term meaning "way" to describe the vast, unfathomable reality of
which every form is but a transient manifestation has very subtle
implications, pointing to the non-dual nature of reality; for, if reality is in fact
non-dual, then the source, the way to the goal, the wayfarer, and the goal are
all indivisible from one another.

What this means in practice is that one seeks to attain to a state of intuitive
understanding in which the unity of "I" and "other" is experienced as vividly
as the heat of fire or the coldness of ice.

Thus realization of the identity of one's true nature and the true nature of the
Tao leads to acceptance of health and illness, gain and loss, up and down,
life and death as being equally essential to the natural functioning of things,
and therefore in no way to be deplored.

From John Blofeld's Introduction to The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain

From this consciousness flows such harmony between reality (the
Tao) and its transient manifestation (say, you or me) that henceforth
one can act with pure spontaneity in dealing with all life's exigencies,
like a tree bending toward sunlight. Fear and anxiety vanish; for, in
an ultimate sense, nothing can ever go wrong. Light and dark, up
and down, health and sickness, life and death are all part of the
interplay of transient phenomena whereby the Tao manifests the Tao.
Your birth added nothing to it. My death will take nothing from it.

If this life be not a real fight, in which
something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it
is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one
may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight--as if
there were something really wild in the universe which we,
with all our idealities and faithfulness, are needed to redeem.

William James

(qtd. Robert D. Richardson in "William James: In the
Maelstrom of Modernism")

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