Quotes About Transcendence

Pour lui, le pinceau est un pendule entre ciel et terre, et l'art de la calligraphie la meilleure façon de se tenir en suspens entre le monde terrestre et celui des dieux.

I reach and have reached the timeless moment, the pure suspension within time, only through love.

What I long for with a deep ache inside me is sacred music. I long for the Fauré Requiem, for the Haydn "Mass in Time of War," for some pure celestial music that could lift me above myself, into that sphere where great art lives, beyond what man can be in himself, the intimation of the sacred—what cannot be dirtied or smudged by wickedness or by anger, which no threat can touch.

Pero ahora sabía, de un modo en que antes no lo había sabido, que lo que había heredado era vivificante y reparador para mi vida y lo sería hasta el final de mis días o incluso más allá. ... llegué a la conclusión de que si uno es capaz de profundizar lo suficiente, seguro que es capaz de atravesar la roca.

I felt as if the Milky Way, hovering above our heads like a celestial pitcher, had suddenly overturned, pouring suns and planets down my throat. Stars seemed to be shooting out of my finger and toes, the ends of my hair.

whatever it is that happens to people after they're dead. Rejoicing in heaven, or burning in hell, or being reincarnated, or ascending another plane of consciousness, or whatever.

Trying to imagine heaven could be like... trying to picture the fourth dimension. We can't do it. But that doesn't mean it's not there.

And in that moment, I swear we were infinite

When we speak radically of the dark divine, the invitation is for each and every one of us to transcend race and gender, to move beyond categories into the interior spaces of our psyches and encounter there the ground of our being, the place of mystery, creativity, and possibility, for it is there that we can construct the mind that can resist, that can revision, that can create the maps that when followed will liberate us.

Krishna: "The wise grieve not for those who live; and they grieve not for those who die—for life and death shall pass away.

Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.

Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine. You're moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms.

Calix meus inebrians.

From the outset the Buddhist tradition has been divided between the most uncompromising moral rigorism and a subversion of all ideals in the name of a higher truth, transcending good and evil. M?h?yana Buddhism, in particular, argued that the ultimate truth can be discovered only by those who awaken to the reality of desire and are able to transmute it.

D. T.] Suzuki's obvious sincerity and his intense yearning for transcendence did not prevent his thinking from being ideologically flawed, informed as it was by his culture, his social status, and his sectarian affiliations. This, of course, raises the questions of the place whence he spoke and whether an enlightened person can assume any privilege with regard to historical determinations. Suzuki claimed this privilege for Zen masters, and by implication for himself.

I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet -- a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and the fearful passionless force of non-human things.

The centre of me is always and eternally in terrible pain ... A searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfiguring and infinite.

The man who can centre his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life which is impossible to the pure egoist.

Although personal survival after death is an illusion, there is nevertheless something in the human mind that is eternal

For either death is a dreamless sleep—which is plainly good—or the soul migrates to another world.

I must, before I die, find some means of saying the essential thing which is in me, which I have not yet said, a thing which is neither love nor hate nor pity nor scorn but the very breath of life, shining and coming from afar, which will link into human life the immensity, the frightening, wondrous and implacable forces of the non-human.

I shall never lose the sense of being a ghost.

brazier over which some passing Deity will, for a casual aeon or so, warm his omnipotent hands. But until then, one can stand safely on its edge, watching the lake of pink and scarlet wings, so far below — the lake that seems to have stolen for the moment, at least, all the mountain's fire.

Every now and then a moment of clarity hits us, and we feel known by something—Someone—of inestimable greatness.