Quotes About Transcendence

You did not love an angel to be safe, or in the interests of survival, or even because you thought the angel might even love you back. You did not love an angel because you thought you could tame an angel, change it, make it safe. You loved an angel because to love an angel was to touch something larger than yourself, and because the process of that touch enlarged you as well.

Perhaps what I was feeling was the thing called awe.

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It felt-it felt like the Ativahikas had, when they spoke to me. As if something were inside me, vast and ancient and yet somehow still a part of me, or containing me, speaking from the halls of my own being. Speaking in a language deeper than any I had ever had to learn.

If she were to be Exalt, one of these arrogant cryptic beings, it semed unfair that she did not have wings.

He steps forward, tossing his forelock about the root of his horn, and his beauty does not strangle me.

She smiled as he came closer, her eyes as violet now as twilight, matching the shadows that surrounded them and lay under her cheekbones. The lines of her collarbone glinted like knives, and he could see the rings of her larynx through the translucent skin of her throat. He thought the bones of her fingers might crumble if he simply reached out and took her hand; even her amazing hair was lusterless and dry in its floor-long beads.

She could no longer thrust her hand into living flame and cup it like water, from palm to palm.

It sounded religious to her. We come from dust. We are stardust. We are dust on the wind.

I leave a lovely opalescent ribbon: I know this.

Butterflies... not quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures

Fairyland...Paradise...In this place and at this time, Marguerite could know that the one was a parable of the other and both were synonyms for something that had no name.

Life was full of these intuitions that one must get smaller, go further in. The golden box was so deeply within that it was hard to find, yet it contained an entire country and was, she supposed, the only luggage one could take with one if there was anywhere to go beyond death.

The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species at that.

Rumi says: Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing There is a field. I'll meet you there.

One more: This had to do with death. It had to do with a sense of leaving, he could feel himself almost leaving the world and he did not believe in any afterlife and so this filled him on certain nights with a kind of terror.

Let's not be too harsh where poets are concerned. They have to live in no-man's-land, halfway between dreams and reality.

Plotinus was also the most relentlessly antimaterialist thinker in history. He taught his disciples that everything we see or imagine to be real is actually only a series of faded images of a higher realm of pure ideas and pure spirit, intelligible only to the soul. According to his student Porphyry of Tyre, he was even sorry that his soul had to live inside a physical body.

The God that Socrates presented to his disciples stood above and beyond the familiar myths and rituals. Socrates's God shares the same transcendent immortality as the soul and lies beyond all material space and time. He dwells naturally in the same afterlife as the Forms:

sin is an effort to gain the ecstasy and the knowledge that pertain alone to angels, and in making this effort man becomes a demon.

In every grain of wheat there lies hidden the soul of a star.

There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these 'chases in Arras, dreams in a career,' beyond them all as beyond a veil. I do not know whether any human being has ever lifted that veil; but I do know, Clarke, that you and I shall see it lifted this very night from before another's eyes. You may think this all strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan.

Humanity could only have survived and flourished if it held social and personal values that transcended the urges of the individual, embodying selfish desires - and these stem from the sense of a transcendent good.

I! I who fashioned myself a sorcerer or an angel, who dispensed with all morality, I have come back to the earth.