Quotes About Numinous

As I turned toward writing, which is partially intellectual in its function, but is primarily intuitive and emotional in its execution, I turned towards that which was numinous and emotional in me, and that was the legend of King Arthur Asleep Under the Hill. It stood for all that I'd had to give up in order to understand what I'd had to give up.

There...is your spiritual obligation to literature: root out the reductive; seek excellence; pursue the numinous. And, along with a disciplined intellect (for one is of no use without the other) give to children their imaginations, of which they are being robbed with totalitarian intensity by the trash around them.

Rudolf Otto, the German historian of religion who published his important book The Idea of the Holy in 1917, believed that this sense of the "numinous" was basic to religion. It preceded any desire to explain the origin of the world or find a basis for ethical behavior.

I was on the verge of something numinous and profound and in one more second the universe was going to crack open and arcana would rain down on my head like grace and all the cosmic mysteries were going to be revealed.

The term numinous is like the terms substance, meaning, being, and a host of other terms; in the final analysis we can only define them in terms of themselves.

La mente umana segue il sentiero archetipico numinoso che parte dal suo interno.

Obviously, insights gained from gnosis are rarely welcomed as topics of conversation at social gatherings. To break the silence and speak about what you know to be your spiritual reality, or tell another about a numinous experience or your philosophical insights or take up a religious vocation becomes possible for many women only when they are over fifty and have found friends with spiritual depth.

subtle or bold, The Weird acknowledges that our search for understanding about worlds beyond our own cannot always be found in science or religion and thus becomes an alternative path for exploration of the numinous.

There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Coming to worship the Lord in the "beauty of holiness" somehow gets translated into the "warmth of niceness." Almost entirely gone is the experience of being run through, pierced by the numinous.

There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

It may be that the numinous spirit of the written word does not perish and so, too, bestows life after death.

And 'the holy' will be, in Dr. Otto's language, a complex category of the 'numinous' and the 'moral', or, in one of his favourite metaphors, a fabric in which we have the non-rational numinous experience as the woof and the rational and ethical as the warp.

The dream was strongest of all when Kate's heart was broken. Then she fell asleep as if falling out of life, and the dream became numinous as real things are numinous, vivid even as it blankly slept. She couldn't prove it even to her own satisfaction, but she felt the dream was quickened by love.

What chance could an algorithm have against all that inner chaos? And yet that remains the crucial challenge of the future, to bridge the gap between the calculable and the numinous, between the machine and the erratic, unstable, passion-ruled soul of man,

Lovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try to conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday.

What is beauty?) I think beauty is a reflection of the light of God. I can't give you a better definition than that. It's one of the ways in which we can come close to understanding the numinous mystery in which we have our being. (from NPR Interviews 1995 edited by Robert Siegel)

To me, reason is as spiritual as anything else, the beauty of reason seems to me indelible and ineffable and numinous... the spirit is after all the same word we use to describe... essence

modern times, of course, political ideologies have taken over the numinous function, with the face of the leader multiplied on a thousand banners.

If our shallow, self-critical culture sometimes seems to lack a sense of the numinous or spiritual it's only in the same way a fish lacks a sense of the ocean.

Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we're formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential.

In Giappone poi, che in qualche modo, anclhe nella maniera meno diretta, rappresenta lo stato, quindi l'imperatore , è investito in maniera maggiore o minore d'un carattere nettamente numinoso. Dinnanzi a lui ci si inchina profondamente, passandogli vicino si guarda per terra, magari tirando su col fiato con quel caratteristico sibilo che indica imbarazzo e reverenza, definito da Pierre Loti "un sifflement de vipère" .

I talk about religion because it's one of the ways human beings find power and belonging. Religion is more than just that - I think faith traditions give us ways to talk about experiences of the numinous, too - but power and belonging are a big part of it.

The experiences of BPM I typically have strong mystical overtones; they feel sacred or holy. More precise, perhaps, would be the term numinous, which C.G. Jung used to avoid religious jargon. When we have experiences of this kind, we feel that we have encountered dimnensions of reality that belong to a superior order.