There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.
When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting.
Treat the other man’s faith gently; it is all he has to believe with. His mind was created for his own thoughts, not yours or mine.
God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.
It is only by feeling your love that the poor will forgive you for the gifts of bread.
The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through all eternity.
Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain.
A tree growing out of the ground is as wonderful today as it ever was. It does not need to adopt new and startling methods.
The world is God’s language to us.
Our business is to wake up. We have to find ways in which to detect the whole of reality in the one illusory part which our self-centered consciousness permits us to see. We must not live thoughtlessly, taking our illusion for the complete reality, but at the same time we must not live too thoughtfully in the sense of trying to escape from the dream state. We must be continuously on our watch for ways in which we may enlarge our consciousness.
Rose-colored glasses are never made in bifocals. Nobody wants to read the small print in dreams.
Karma is like taking a full swing on a golf ball in a tile bathroom.
The idea of a meaningless universe is in itself a highly creative imaginative act. Animals . . . could not imagine such an idiocy, so the theory shows an incredible accomplishment of an obviously ordered mind and intellect that can imagine itself to be the result of non-order or chaos — you have a creature who is capable of mapping its own brain, imagining that the brain’s fantastic regulated order could emerge from a reality that has no meaning.
I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. . . . We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blond Hero — really look — and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about 50 years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. “You must change your life,” he said. When the true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask — half our great theological and metaphysical problems — are like that.
You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime you just may find you get what you need.
