Quotes About Transcendence

We cannot kindle when we willThe fire that in the heart resides,The spirit bloweth and is still,In mystery our soul abides.

Her cabined, ample spiritIt fluttered and failed for breath.Tonight it doth inheritThe vasty hall of death.

We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.

Waiting from heaven for the spark to fall.

Creativity as Divine intimacy flows through us and is bigger than we are, urging us to go to the edge and grow larger. And our growth in turn delights God. "God is delighted to watch your soul enlarge," says Eckhart.

No attribute of God is more dreadful to sinners than His holiness.

The more dead we are to the delights of sense the better prepared we are for the pleasures of heaven.

It's a razor's edge kind of innocence, which relies on a willingness to be duped for the sake of transcending ordinary experience, for the sake of astonishment.

what I feel with regard to our Mass, for instance, is the exact opposite of what you think you would be bound to feel. I feel at Mass as if I were breathing the kind of air you breathe on the mountains in spring, or in a wood, or in the fields at dawn on a spring day; something where the freshness is fresh beyond all sweetness: it is more than sweetness, it is simply fresh--unspeakably fresh . . . that is all, and that is enough. . . .

One thing must be understood : I have said nothing extraordinary or even surprising. What is extraordinary begins at the moment I stop. But I am no longer able to speak of it.

As long as I live, I am a mortal man, but when I die, by ceasing to be a man I also cease to be mortal, I am no longer capable of dying, and my impending death horrifies me because I see it as it is: no longer death but the impossibility of dying.

Maurice Maeterlinck

For what are in reality the things we call 'Wisdom,' 'Virtue,' 'Heroism,' 'sublime hours,' and 'great moments of life,' but the moments when we have more or less issued forth from ourselves, and have been able to halt, be it only for an instant, on the step of one of the eternal gates whence we see that the faintest cry, the most colourless thought, and most nerveless gestures do not drop into nothingness; …

signs of a life that we cannot explain are everywhere, vibrating by the side of the life of every day.

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

We speak of 'inspiration,' and the word should be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of Being.

What resists phenomenology within us--natural being, the 'barbarian' source Schelling spoke of--cannot remain outside phenomenology. The philosopher must bear his shadow, which is not simply the factual absence of future light.

The 'invisible world': it is given originally as non-Urprasentierbar, as the other is in his body given originally as absent--as a divergence, as a transcendence.

The abyss is not to be conceived of as lack of Being, but as more than Being.

The...present is itself a transcendent: one knows that it is not there, that it was just there, one never coincides with it--It is not a segment of time with defined contours that would come and set itself in place. It is a cycle defined by a central and dominant region and with indecisive contours--a swelling or bulb of time...an institution, a system of equivalences.

Surpassing surpasses only through recurrence.

God is not known apart from experience, but we take hold of him in the finite.

The inside is seen in the outside--grasps it better than itself. Relation to the outside that is not 'representation' but ecstasy...And reciprocally, the visible is the transactions, the chemistry, the music, and interrelationship and the 'operation of interests' [Claudel] of Anima.

What resists phenomenology within us -- natural being, the 'barbarous' source that Schelling spoke of -- cannot remain outside phenomenology and should have its place within it.