The contrast between that bright blue and white Christmas-tree ornament and the black sky, that infinite universe, and the size and significance of it really comes through. It is so small and so fragile, such a precious little spot in that universe, that you can block it out with your thumb. You realize that everything that means anything to you — all of history and art and death and birth and love, tears and joys, all of it, is on that little blue and white spot out there which you can cover with your thumb. And you realize from that perspective that you have changed, that there is something new, that the relationship is no longer what it was.
I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul, The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me, The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue.
Once in ancient India there was a tournament held to test marksmanship in archery. A wooden fish was set up on a high pole and the eye of the fish was the target. One by one many valiant princes came and tried their skill, but in vain. Before each one shot his arrow the teacher asked him what he saw, and invariably all replied that they saw a fish on a pole at a great height with head, eyes, etc.; but Arjuna, as he took his aim, said, “I see the eye of the fish,” and he was the only who succeeded in hitting the mark.
Our discipline is the unknown; the mind has a window toward infinity.
You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. . . . So why bother in the first place? Just this: what is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above.
One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer but one has seen. There is an art to conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.
The transmigration of life takes place in one’s mind. Let one therefore keep the mind pure, for what a man thinks, that he becomes.
Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty — beneath its covering — that you will find the earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage, then, to claim it — that is all. But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are pilgrims together, wending through unknown country, home.
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, wind up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.
Freedom breeds freedom. Nothing else does.
