I came to love you too late, Oh Beauty, so ancient and so new. Yes, I came to love you too late. What did I know? You wereinside me, and I was out of my body and mind, looking for you. Idrove like an ugly madman against the beautiful things andbeings you made. You were [...]
Where is my dwelling place? Where I can never stand.
Where is my final goal, toward which I should ascend?
It is beyound all place. What should my quest then be?
I must, transcending God, into the desert flee.
Angelus Silesius
Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge.
Whatever is God to a man, that is his heart and soul; and conversely, God is the manifested inward nature, the expressed self of a man,–religion the solemn unveiling of a man’s hidden treasures, the revelation of his intimate thoughts, the open confession of his love-secrets.
Feuerbach, [...]
It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed “Wisdom.” And then I know exactly what is going to follow: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
Wittgenstein
Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can recieve from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.
Emerson
Seers of the Infinite have ever been quiet souls. They abide alone with themselves and the Infinite, or if they do look around them, grudge to no one who understands the Mighty Word his own peculiar way.
I maintain that in all better souls religion springs necessarily by itself, that a province of its own in [...]
Our theism is the purification of the human mind. Man can paint, or make, or think, nothing but man. He believes that the great material elements had their origin from his thought. And our philosophy finds one essence collected or distributed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men
WHY? and WHEREFORE?— God wot, simply THEREFORE! Ask not WHY; ’tis SITH thou hast to care for.
Thomas Carlyle
To stand on one leg and prove God’s existence is a very different thing from going down on one’s knees and thanking him.
Kierkegaard, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard
O LIFE! what letts thee from a quicke decease?
O death! what drawes thee from a present praye?
My feast is done, my soule would be at ease,
My grace is saide; O death! come take awaye.
I live, but such a life as ever dyes;
I dye, but such a death as never endes;
My death to end my dying [...]
