Quotes About Transcendence

shaking people up." Finally, art was for both of them not an end in itself but a way of achieving an ascetic renunciation of the world. "Art should be given the chance to phase itself out," Gould

To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world is almost a palpable movement. To enjoy the epic form of that gratification it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small hour of the night, and, having first expanded with a sense of difference from the mass of civilized mankind, who are diregardful of all such proceedings at this time, long and quietly watch your stately progress through the stars.

His parted lips were lips which spoke, not of love, but of millions of miles; those were eyes which habitually gazed, not into the depths of other eyes, but into other worlds. Within his temples dwelt thoughts, not of woman's looks, but of stellar aspects and the configuration of constellations.

At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carollings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware.

Then he stood with his back to the fire regarding her, and saw in her almost a divinity.

Poi si faceva più chiaro, e i suoi lineamenti diventavano semplicemente femminili, cambiandosi da quelli di una divinità capace di dare la beatitudine in quelli di un essere che agognava di possederla

Music drew an angel down, said the poet: but what is that to drawing down worlds!

Being a man not without a frequent consciousness that there was some charm in this life he led, he stood still after looking at the sky as a useful instrument, and regarded it in an appreciative spirit, as a work of art superlatively beautiful. For a moment, he seemed impressed with the speaking loneliness of the scene, or rather with the complete abstraction from all its compass of the sights and sounds of man. Human shapes, interferences, troubles, and joys were all as if they were not

I am the family face: Flesh perishes, I live on, Projecting trait and trace, Through time to times anon, And leaping from place to place Over oblivion

So long as we are, death is not; and when death is present, we are not. In other words, between death and us there is no rapport; it is something with which we have nothing to do - and only incidentally the world and nature.

Mais tout restait dissous dans une délicatesse et une pâleur spectrales, exempt de toute ligne que l'Å"il aurait pu suivre avec certitude ; les contours des cimes se perdaient, s'embrumaient, s'en allaient en fumée.

The past was only tolerable if one felt above it, instead of having to stare stupidly at it aware of one's present impotence.

a phenomenon conveyed by matter, like the rainbow on the waterfall

Mais ce qu'il éprouvait, ce qu'il comprenait, et ce dont il jouissait par-dessus tout, [...] c'était l'idéalité triomphante de la musique, de l'art, du cÅ"ur humain, la haute et irréfutable sublimation qu'ils faisaient subir à la vulgaire laideur de la réalité.

Celui qui a contemplé la Beauté est déjà prédestiné à la mort.

God is spirit, and above languages is language.

La Belleza, es, pues, el camino del hombre sensible hacia el espíritu...

immerse yourself in the great riddle of this dream of life here on earth. It is as nothing since it ends and dissolves into nothingness. Yet everywhere in this nothingness, quickening it to life, the infinite is at hand!

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. The mind that responds to the intellectual and spiritual values that lie hidden in a poem, a painting, or a piece of music, discovers a spiritual vitality that lifts it above itself, takes it out of itself, and makes it present to itself on a level of being that it did not know it could ever achieve.

The soul of man, left to its own natural level, is a potentially lucid crystal left in darkness. It is perfect in its own nature, but it lacks something that it can only receive from outside and above itself. But when the light shines in it, it becomes in a manner transformed into light and seems to lose its nature in the splendor of a higher nature, the nature of the light that is in it.

If we enter into ourselves, find our true self, and then pass beyond the inner I, we sail forth into the immense darkness in which we confront the I AM of the Almighty.

It is here, in this poverty, that man regains the eternal being that once he was, now is and evermore shall be.

To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being.

In Silence, God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience.