Quotes from Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

en otros términos, quien dice ingestión dice asimilación. En palabras de Meister Eckhart: «el alma se une con Dios como el alimento con el hombre, que así se vuelve ojo en el ojo, oído en el oído; así en Dios el alma deviene Dios»; pues «yo soy lo que me absorbe más que yo mismo».

sino en sacrificar (hacer sagrado) todo lo que hacemos y todo lo que somos, en santificar cada acto natural por una reducción de todas las actividades a su principio. Decimos «natural» de forma intencionada para dar a entender que todo lo que es hecho naturalmente puede ser sagrado o profano según nuestro grado de conocimiento, pero que todo lo que no es hecho naturalmente es esencial e irrevocablemente profano.

To propose an agreement on principles does not involve or imply that the Western world should be Orientalized ; propaganda is out of the question as between gentlemen, and everyone must make use of the forms appropriate to his own psychophysical constitution. It is the European that wants to practice Yoga ; the Oriental points out that he has already contemplative disciplines of his own.

La individualidad es motivada y perpetuada por el deseo, y la causa de todo deseo es la ignorancia (avidy?).

Dios da tanto como podemos tomar de él, y la medida de su ofrecimiento depende de la medida en que «nosotros mismos» nos hayamos abandonado.

We 'preserve' folk songs, at the same time that our way of life destroys the singer…we are proud of our museums, where we display the damning evidence of a way of life that we have made impossible.

Let us tell them the painful truth, that most of these works of art are about God, whom we never mention in polite society.

What we see in a democracy governed by "representatives" is not a government "for the people" but an organized conflict of interests that only results in the setting up of unstable balances of power.

What I have sought is to understand what has been said.

Free thought is a passion; it is much rather the thoughts than ourselves that are free.

Art is nothing tangible. We cannot call a painting 'art' as the words 'artifact' and 'artificial' imply. The thing made is a work of art made by art, but not itself art. The art remains in the artist and is the knowledge by which things are made.

The life or lives of man may be regarded as constituting a curve —an arc of time-experience subtended by the duration of the individual Will to Life.

Our hankering for a state of leisure or leisure state is the proof of the fact that most of us are working at a task to which we could never have been called by anyone but a salesman, certainly not by God or by our own natures. Traditional craftsmen whom I have known in the East cannot be dragged away from their work, and will work overtime to their own pecuniary loss. Why Exhibit Works of Art?

It is one of the prime errors of historical and rational analysis to suppose that the "truth" and "original form" of a legend can be separated from its miraculous elements. It is in the marvels themselves that the truth inheres.

It is only when the maker of things is a maker of things by vocation, and not merely holding down a job, that the price of things is approximate to their real value.

Not my way of salvation, to surrender the world! Rather for me the taste of Infinite Freedom While yet I am bound by a thousand bonds to the wheel . . . In each glory of sound and sight and scent I shall find Thy infinite joy abiding: My passion shall burn as the flame of salvation, The flower of my love shall become the ripe fruit of devotion.

The vocation, whether it be that of the farmer or the architect, is a function; the exercise of this function as regards the man himself is the most indispensable means of spiritual development, and as regards his relation to society the measure of his worth.

The traditional arts and crafts are, in fact, "mysteries," with "secrets" that are not merely "tricks of the trade" of economic value (like the so-much-abused European "patents"), but pertain to the worldwide and immemorial symbolism of the techniques, all of which are analogies or imitations of the creative nature in operation

While there may have lived an individual teacher who gave the ancient wisdom its peculiarly "Buddhist" coloring, his personality is completely overshadowed, as he must have wished it should be, by the eternal substance with which he identified himself. In other words, "the Buddha is only anthropomorphic, not a man".

We who play the game of life so desperately for temporal stakes might be playing at love with God for higher stakes—our selves, and his. We play against one another for possessions, who might be playing with the King who stakes his throne and what is his against our lives and all we are: a game in which the more is lost, the more is won.

If the "signs and wonders" are lightly dismissed, it is not because they are unreal, but because it is an evil and adulterous generation that asketh for a sign.

What I have sought is to understand what has been said.