The disciples were full of questions about God.
Said the master, “God is the Unknown and the Unknowable. Every statement about him, every answer to your questions, is a distortion of the truth.”
The disciples were bewildered. “Then why do you speak about him at all?”
“Why does the bird sing?” said the master.
Oh bless the continuous stutter of the Word being made into flesh.
There isn’t any secret formula or method. You learn love by loving — by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.
Adam was but human — this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake; he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent — then he would have eaten the serpent.
God instructs the heart not by ideas, but by pains and contradictions.
Anything that is given can be at once taken away. We have to learn never to expect anything, and when it comes it’s no more than a gift on loan.
Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
You climb up through the little grades and then get to the top and everybody cheers; with the sweat in your eyebrows you can’t see very well and the noise swirls around you and lifts you up, and then you’re out, not forgotten at first, just out, and it feels good and cool and free. You’re out, and sort of melt, and keep lifting, until you become like to these kids just one more piece of the sky of adults that hangs over them in the town, a piece that for some queer reason has clouded and visited them.
Blessed be the beds that bring us down to worship one another in the night — Never, oh never naked enough to know the Being of the other.
Yet no matter how deeply I go down into myself my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots, that drink in silence.
“Lady, a man is divided into two parts, body and spirit. . . . A body and a spirit,” he repeated. “The body, lady, is like a house, it don’t go anywhere; but the spirit, lady, is like an automobile: always on the move, always. . . .”
The wind said You know I’m the result of forces beyond my control
It had done me good to be somewhat parched by the heat and drenched by the rain of life.
If you were healed of a dreadful wound, you did not want to keep the bandage.
One has not understood until one has forgotten it.
After an hour or so in the woods looking for mushrooms, Dad said, “Well, we can always go and buy some real ones.”
