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"Despair says I cannot lift that weight. Happiness says I do not have to." -- James Richardson, poet
"The pearl at the bottom of the sea is born all alone, of living flesh; pure and round, it frees itself, immortal, from that ephemeral being that has given it birth. It is the image of that lesion which the desire for perfection causes in us, and that slowly results in this priceless globule. . . The soul, wounded and impregnated, possesses deep within itself, a device which permits it to solidify time into eternity." -- from "The Eye Listens" by French poet Paul Claudel
"A desire to remain lost in an open, endlessly prolonged act of creation fuses with the knowledge that painting is from the first an act of parting, and that those who make art are destined to confront not just love and new life but death, loss, and subjective isolation." -- from "A Study of Vermeer" by Edward Snow
"The lesson. . . of Greek tragedy and, ultimately, of all religions, is that there is an instinctive tendency towards divine intoxication which the rational world of calculation cannot bear." -- from "Literature and Evil" by George Bataille
"The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated." -- Gandhi
"Mysticism expresses its trances through the vocabulary of love." from "Literature and Evil" by George Bataille
"I do not know whether or not science will formulate its grand theory of the universe. I know that it will not make it any easier to read the plan texts of our hearts. It is plain but it seems like a secret alphabet. We train as our own Egyptologists, hoping the fragments will tell a tale. We work at night as alchemists, struggling to decipher the letters mirrored and reversed. We are people who trace with our finger a marvellous book, but when we turn to read it again the letters have vanished. Always the book must be rewritten. Sometimes a letter at a time is all we can do." -- from "The Powerbook," a novel by Jeannette Winterson
"Psychiatry was invented as a defense against visionaries." -- Poet Anne Carson
"As members of human society, perhaps the most difficult task we face daily is that of touching one another -- whether the touch is physical, moral, emotional or imaginary. Contact is crisis. As the anthropologists say, 'Every touch is a modified blow.' " -- from "Dirt & Disease: Essay on the Phenomenoogy of Female Pollution in Antiquity" by poet Anne Carson
"Past. Present. Future. The rational divisons of the rational life. And always underneath, in dreams, in recollections, in the moment of hesitation on a busy street, the hunch that life is not rational, not divided. That the mirrored compartments could break." -- Jeannette Winterson, Gut Symmetries
"The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense." -- Jeannette Winterson, Gut Symmetries
"When the one whom I have benefited with great hope
Hurts me very badly without reason,
I will learn to view that person
As an excellent spiritual guide."
-- Eight Verses for Training the Mind, Geshe Lang-ri Tang-pa (1054-1123)
"Compassion refers to a state of mind that makes it utterly unbearable for us to see the suffering of other sentient beings. The way to develop this is through understanding how we feel about our own suffering." -- Dzogchen, The Heart Essence of the Great Perfection, by the Dalai Lama
"A thousand years may be beyond me, but I can turn this morning into forever." -- Ta'o Chi'en
"Again, the lesson of spiritual practice is not about gaining knowledge, but about how we love." -- Jack Kornfield
"You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself wholly to each day, as though a fire were raging in your hair." --Deshimaru
"Because so far within the abyss
Of the eternal statue lies what you ask,
It is cut off from all created sight."
-- Dante, Paradiso xxi l.94-96 
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