After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
He who has the courage to laugh is almost as much the master of the world as he who is ready to die.
In Holy Communion we have Christ under the appearance of bread. In our work we find him under the appearance of flesh and blood. It is the same Christ.
Who never ate his bread with tears, Who never sat weeping on his bed During care-ridden nights Knows you not, you heavenly powers.
The mystical union on the one hand. The resurrection of the body, on the other. I can’t reach the ghost of an image, a formula, or even a feeling that combines them. But the reality we are given to understand, does. Reality the iconoclast once more. Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us the subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.
. . . time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.
Every ruling minority needs to numb and, if possible, to kill the time-sense of those whom it exploits by proposing a continuous present. This is the authoritarian secret of all methods of imprisonment.
To find ourselves spoken for in art gives dignity to our pain, our anger, our lust, our losses.
The Zen student, the poet, the husband, the wife — none knows with certainty what he or she is staying for, but all know the likelihood that they will be staying for “a while”: to find out what they are staying for. And it is the faith of all those disciplines that they will not stay to find out that they should not have stayed.
History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised once again.
All of us have occasionally met people who seem to have made and kept their own laws. They are the creative ones. Their personalities are in some way illuminated from within. Everybody should make an effort to discover the good and true by himself, and then to set standards based upon his own findings.
The main error of the biomedical approach is the confusion between disease processes and disease origins. Instead of asking why an illness occurs, and trying to remove the conditions that lead to it, medical researchers try to understand the biological mechanism through which the disease operates, so that they can then interfere with them.
The only way to be free is to give completely.
I am not bound by this vast work of creation. I am and I watch the drama of events.
I have made a great discovery. I no longer believe in anything. . . . It is not the object that matters to me but what is between them: it is this ‘in-between’ that is the real subject of my pictures. When one reaches this state of harmony between things and one’s self, one reaches . . . a state of perfect freedom and peace — which makes everything possible and right. Life then becomes perpetual revelation.
True universality does not consist in knowing much but in loving much.
It seems as though I had not drunk from the cup of wisdom, but had fallen into it.
As one has to learn to read or to practice a trade, so one must learn to feel in all things, first and most solely, the obedience of the universe to God. It is really an apprenticeship, it requires time and effort.
The only certainties that don’t break down are those acquired in prayer.
Being happy is a virtue too.
