Like the darkness in a fathomless sea darkened
by wave above wave,
and above it all, clouds.
Layers over layers of dark.
If one stretches forth his hand he can scarcely see it.
For he for whom God has not set up a light, has no light.
The Qur’an – 24:40
And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and
about death.)
I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the
least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment
then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the
glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d
by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.
The Gospel According to Mark 10:17
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 were inside me, and I was out of my body and mind, looking for you. I drove like an ugly madman against the beautiful things andbeings you made. You were in fact inside me, but I was not inside you. Those same things kept me at some distance from you, even though those things, had they not been inside you, would not have existed at all. You called to me and cried to me; you broke the bowl of my deafness; you uncovered your beams, and threw them at me; you rejected my blindness; you blew afragrant wind on me, and I sucked in my breath and wanted you; I tasted you and now I want you as I want food and water; you touched me, and I have been burning ever since to have your peace.
St. Augustine
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, The Essence of Christianity
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.
Ralph Waldo 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 the mind belongs to it, in which it has ultimate sway; that it is worthy to animate most profoundly the noblest and best and to be fully accepted and known by them.
The sum total of religion is to feel that, in its highest unity, all that moves us in feeling is one; to feel that whatever is single and particular is only possible by means of this unity; to feel, that is to say, that our being and living is a being and living in and through God.
Schleiermacher
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