Quotes from Erazim V. Kohák

The blue sky, the moral act, the moment of grief have their absolute validity, independent of the before and the after.

The body I have and am is my most intimate point of entry into the world. It serves me, at times it sustains my flagging spirity with its vitality, at other times it reminds me of my finitude with its limitations.

The conventions of hedonism and of utility can, in fact, be extremely elaborate. Its motives, however, though perhaps wholly free of greed, remain strictly those of need. Goodness remains reducible to utility, rightness to prudence, beauty to aesthetic enjoyment. The point of reference is individual preference, not the generically human vision of a moral sense of life. What is missing is the recognition of intrinsic beauty, rightness, goodness.

It is not simply in wonder but in love that philosophy begins.

There was day, and there was dusk. It is time to let the night come.

Snakes, too, help recall the goodness of being. They have had a bad press, yet of all the creatures of the field, stream, and forest they are perhaps the most peaceful - and most shy.

Good people destroy nothing needlessly, protect even insects from the flame of the lamp or rescue earthworms from drying asphalt into grass. They are protectors of all life—and do not fear ridicule.

The perfect is not simply the ideal, as a perfect marriage is not simply a storybook meeting of souls. It is rather the optimal incarnation of spirit, the point at which the presence achieves maximal concreteness and the actual lets the presence shine through most clearly. Perhaps that, too, is the meaning of the Cross.