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.

Anthony de Mello
The Song of the Bird

Oh bless the continuous stutter
of the Word being made into flesh.

Leonard Cohen

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.

Aldous Huxley

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.

Mark Twain

God instructs the heart not by ideas, but by pains and contradictions.

Jean Pierre De Caussade

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.

John McGahern
The Leavetaking

Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

John Watson

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.

John Updike
Rabbit Run

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.

Lee Pieper

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.

Rainer Maria Rilke

“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. . . .”

Flannery O’Connor
A Good Man Is Hard to Find

The wind said
     You know I’m
          the result of
forces beyond my control

A.R. Ammons
The Wide Land

It had done me good to be somewhat parched by the heat and drenched by the rain of life.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

If you were healed of a dreadful wound, you did not want to keep the bandage.

Ursula Reilly Curtiss
The Wasp

One has not understood until one has forgotten it.

Suzuki Daisetz

After an hour or so in the woods looking for mushrooms, Dad said, “Well, we can always go and buy some real ones.”

John Cage