What Inspires Me: Literature
You will find here a collection of quotes, thoughts, visuals that inspire my work and influence my life, art, who I am and how do I see the world.
Much Madness is divinest Sense -
To a discerning Eye -
Emily Dickinson, "Much Madness is divinest Sense"
"Those who know are not learned.
The learned do not know."
- Lao Tzu, "Tao Te Ching"
„I think this is the first time I am meeting most of you. But whether it is an old friend or a new friend, there’s not much difference anyway, because I always believe we are the same: We are all just human beings."
- The Dalai Lama
[Music. The witches dance, and vanish.]
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth
The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the power of all true science.
- Albert Einstein
"My dream is to create the feel of travelling to another galaxy."
"Make it holy
With love;"
"Which lies are so big that nobody questions them?"
- Priceonomics, Alex Mayyasi, Rohin Dhar, Zachary Crockett, "Everything is Bullshit, The greatest scams on Earth revealed"
I was alone staring over the ledge
Trying my best not to forget
All manner of joy, all manner of glee
And our one heroic pledge
How it mattered to us, how it mattered to me
And the consequences
I was confused by the birds and the bees
Forgetting if I meant it.
- Placebo, Meds Acoustic
"What the fuck is even real? Have a great day pretending everything is normal."
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution.
- Albert Einstein
"Some people get confused if a sentence does not end as they potato."
"Your soul is in harmony with universe. You are on a journey to find the tune."
"I was totally passionate about anything but normal and wanted to study the supernatural."
"the ghost by night, the girl by day;"
"Love
over
rules"
"The only time you look down on a brother, is when you're helping him up."
"You haven't yet met all the people you will love."
"Reality is not
behind a veil
it is a veil
the thing itself
is not in disguise
it is disguise"
Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis; you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory.
- Stephen Hawking
I just think you should make music totally for yourself.
- Peter Christopherson, Coil
What is art? Like a declaration of love.
- Andrei Tarkovsky, "Sculpting in Time"
Why do you send fools to judge my work?
- Michelangelo
"Happy slaves are the bitterest enemies of freedom."
- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
"- I want to play with the baloon, says John.
- Only venture capitalists can play with this baloon, says Mummy."
"The highest respect we can accord a work of art is to say nothing about it."
- Wayne Koestenbaun
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
- Mary Oliver, The Fourth Sign Of The Zodiac in Blue Horses: Poems
When I return to the darkness,
The darkness returns to itself.
- Yoshihara Sachiko, Candle; Women Poets of Japan
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness."
That which lives on reason lives against the spirit.
- Paracelsus
"my mother would get upset
because I talked to flowers
and my lover was from the past
a poet who came to me in dreams"
"As if we now belonged to another dimension."
“What one man calls God, another calls the laws of physics.”
- Nikola Tesla
"When I go I hope you will give me back to the sky."
"You have to lose your human mind to gain your spiritual senses."
"Plato described Divine Madness as the gift from gods, with Sokrates stating in Phaedrus, "In fact the best things we have come from madness. In Eastern cultures, it has been deployed as a catalyst and means for the deeper understanding of spiritual concepts."
We are in a school for gods, wherein in slow motion we learn the consequences of thought.
- Brugh Joy
It is not the easy or convenient life for which I search, but life lived to the edge of all my possibility.
- Mary Anne Radmacher-Hershey
But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
One Dutch admirer of St. Germain, J. van Sypesteyn, wrote, “Sometimes he fell into a trance, and when he again recovered, he said he had passed the time while he lay unconscious in far-off lands; sometimes he disappeared for a considerable time, then suddenly reappeared, and let it be understood that he had been in another world in communication with the dead.
There’s a legend about a Chinese painter who was asked by the emperor to paint a landscape so pristine that the emperor can enter it. He didn’t do a good job, so the emperor was preparing to assassinate him. But because it was his painting, legend goes, he stepped inside and vanished, saving himself. I always loved that little allegory as an artist. Even when it is not enough for others, if it is enough for you, you can live inside it.
- Ocean Vuong, from an interview with Zoe Hitzig in Prac Crit
The unbroken world is coming
(it must be coming!)
I heard a choir.
- Thomas Lux
"After the Sun comes out
How it alters the World -"
It’s possible to start living again! See things anew as you once did - that is how to restart life!
- Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations"
"I don't want a career I want a huge beautiful garden"
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in a way. As a man is, so he sees.
- William Blake
Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.
- Michelangelo
The harmony of natural law reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.
- Albert Einstein
To become wise they would have to learn the true meaning of their doctrines, symbols and books, of which they at present merely know the outward form and the dead letter. They would have to form a much higher and nobler selves.
- hermeticlibrary
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
- Joseph Campbell
Someone asked me what is my religion. I said, "All the paths that lead to the light."
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
- George Bernard Shaw
"In the Hasidic schools, where even after other meditative methods were abandoned, dance was still used as a means of attaining ecstasy and enlightenment. Even in the most ancient times dance was an important method for attaining enlightenment.
So closely was dance associated with enlightenment, that the Future World, which is viewed as an ultimate place of enlightenment, is described as "A dance conducted by thee Blessed Holy One, where each individual points a finger at Him." "
The essence of all religions is love, compassion, and tolerance. Kindness is my true religion. The clear proof of a person’s love of God is if that person genuinely shows love to fellow human beings.
- Dalai Lama
Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach eighteen.
- Albert Einstein
Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
- Oscar Wilde
There is no greater harm than that of time wasted.
- Michelangelo
"It could take you a year to find out something was a waste of time."
Dream State - the state of diminished consciousness in which the surroundings are perceived as if in a dream
"You don't need love, you are love."
Every age, every generation has its inbuilt assumptions - that thee world is flat, that the world is round. There are hundreds of hidden assumptions, things we take for granted that may or may not be true. In the vast majority of cases, these conceptions about reality - which belong to the prevailing paradigm or worldview - aren't accurate. So if history is any guide, much that we take for granted about the world today simply isn't true.
- John Hagelin, Ph.D.
"You are a victim of the rules you live by."
The whole of nature is in harmony; except for man.
-Mesmer
"It is the ones who are against you that believe in your power the most."
Humans can see only a minuscule part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The spectrum in its entirety is about 10 trillion times larger than that of visible light. Might the mental spectrum be equally vast?
- Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus
"Did you know?
We perceive them as trees,
because their true appearance
would drive us slowly,
inexorably mad."
"Everything is beautiful when you look at it with love."
And so I felt back then that my searching, and everything that it involves, is much more important than what happens or may happen in the world of ’obvious absurds’.
- P. D. Ouspensky
" Access to my energy is a privilege."
Everyone needs to slow down and look at a fucking tree.
- kmarx
"If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."
"I give my mind the task to hold the door open for the ancestors, the guardians, the winds. When I sing poetry there is no way for evil."
"You showed that it's not necessary to be unhappy, even though one is clear-eyed and undeluded about how terrible everything is."
"You should abandon all methods where a development of an individual is demanded."
- Sthephan A. Hoeller, "Jung's Gnosis"
Being amply provided for financially, he was able to continue his studies. Though he initially may have pursued a career in business, he soon turned to asceticism and mysticism. Around the age of twenty-two he became engrossed in the study of the Zohar (a major work of the Kabbalah that had recently been printed for the first time) and adopted the life of a recluse. Retreating to the banks of the Nile for seven years, he secluded himself in an isolated cottage, giving himself up entirely to meditation. He visited his family only on Shabbat. But even at home, he would not utter a word, even to his wife. When it was necessary for him to say something, he would say it in the fewest words possible, and then, only in Hebrew."
- About Isaac Luria, Wikipedia
"We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light."
- Hildegard of Bingen
"Be willing to walk alone. Many who start with you won't finish."
It is not sufficient merely to be a great master in painting and very wise, but I think it is necessary for the painter to be very ethical in his mode of life, or even, if such were possible, a saint, so that the Holy Spirit may inspire his intellect.
- Michelangelo
“A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.”
- Leonardo da Vinci
More often than not the first thing that enslaves us is, I shall say it again, our very selves.
How’s your inner garden? Have the weeds been allowed to overgrow and choke out the rose?
- Marie T. Russell?"
Love was never a popular movement... The world is held together, really it is, held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you've got to remember is what you're looking at is also you. You could be that person, you could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide in yourself, not to be.
- James Baldwin, Meeting the Man
"I am powerless towards your tenderness."
- Emily Dickinson, Letter To Mrs. Samuel Bowles
"Sick and angry people want you to see how powerful they are. Loving people want you to see how powerful you are."
"The vision came
and vanished
But the longing to see does not fade."
Gender: Angel.
An Earth Angel is someone who dreams of a peaceful planet where every being is treated with respect."
"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer; Art is everything else."
- — Donald Ervin Knuth
"Then you wander how can kids eat up those albums like Valiums.
- Eminem
"Angel opens the gates of Hell" by Gustave Dore
So now, from this mad passion which made me take art for an idol and a king I have learnt the burden of error that it bore and what misfortune springs from man’s desire. The world’s frivolities have robbed me of the time That I was given for reflecting upon God.
- Michelangelo
"The most important exchange is within the unknown."
Adventure is not outside a man, it is within.
- David Grayson
For those who feel it, nothing makes the soul so religious and pure as thee endeavor to create something perfect; for God is perfection, and whoever strives after it, is striving after something divine.
- Michelangelo
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
- Stephen Jay Gould
If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power then your job is to empower somebody else.
- Toni Morrison
"The greatest reminded us that service to others is the rent we pay here on Earth."
- themarvinpeake
I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.
- Rabindranath Tagore
"You and your friends fill your mouths with big words–Social Justice, Freedom, Revolution–and meanwhile people waste away, they fall ill, many of them die. Speeches don’t feed people. What the people need are fresh vegetables, and a good fish broth at least once a week. I’m only interested in the kinds of revolution that start off by getting people sat at the table."
- José Eduardo Agualusa, A General Theory of Oblivion
What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.
- Bob Dylan
"A salary is the drug they give you to forget your dreams."
- Kevin O'Leary
"Do you get it yet? We're all being played."
"Two thousand years of chasing taking its toll
And it's coming closer"
"Language is full of wrong definitions, wrong classifications, wrong associations."
- Gurdjieff
If people became organized to act together, there's no particular limit to what you can achieve.
- Noam Chomsky
“Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.”
- Terry Eagleton, "Why Marx Was Right"
"Can you see the link between ignorance and exploitation?"
"Only when a commodity is paid for with money is it respected as an admirable fetish, as a status symbol."
Authentic human interactions become impossible when you lose yourself in a role.
- Eckhart Tolle
"Ideally everything will turn quiet now."
"Did you change the world, or did you let the world change you."
"People should spend time staring at a blank sheet of paper."
"Nobody knows nothing. God knows why."
(And Google does not know either. Though it pretends to know.)
A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times may have altered the course of his life, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe, so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes in Nature. In no way can we get such an overwhelming idea of the grandeur of Nature than when we consider, that in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy, throughout the Infinite, the forces are in a perfect balance, and hence the energy of a single thought may determine the motion of a universe.
- Nikola Tesla
To understand true nature of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.
- Nicola Tesla
"This (sentence) will probably offend someone."
"The proud man is far from God."
"Life is more important than art."
(What about art which makes you feel more alive than life itself?)
"Last year I abstained
this year I devour
without guilt
which is also an art."
In his place I wouldn’t have had to look far for my Judas. You are never so thoroughly betrayed as by yourself.
- Claude Cahun, Aveux non avenus (Disavowals)
Most people don’t know that there are angels whose only job is to make sure you don’t get too comfortable and fall asleep and miss your life.
- Brian Andreas
Most of what we have learned is the truth of others, not our truth. If you discover your truth which is in your heart then you don’t have to live the truths of others, which are the truths of history, generally pretty violent and pretty bizarre.
- Alberto Villoldo
"Ladies and gentlemen. We are floating in space."
"A soul is the best investment."
"Turning sunlight into flesh."
If there’s one phrase that I should probably tattoo on my forehead it is this: I’m not the story you made of me. We can always reject the story placed on top of us, and we can always revise and destroy one story and restore another.
- Lidia Yuknavitch
"A sin is anything that you do which goes against yourself. Everything you feel or believe or say that goes against yourself is a sin."
It would be wonderful if this world was guided by little children, because they are closer to life than anyone else.
- Jaggi Vasudev
I want to be myself again. I want to be six. I want to stop knowing everything I know.
- Catherynne M. Valente, "Deathless"
"We are not playing a game
of sorrow
We are trying to grow
wings
and
fly."
Gender: "just because I am in the shape of a person does not mean I am one."
If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive.
- Eleonora Duse
"It is written,” he said to them, “My house will be a house of prayer, but you have made it ‘a den of robbers.'"
Luke 19:46
I think the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
„Once your mind becomes absolutely still, your intelligence transcends human limitations.”
- Jaggi Vasudev
"Imagine a mind free from entanglement in hatred."
„Trying to change social, national, or global realities without working on human consciousness means there is no serious intention.”
- Jaggi Vasudev
I don’t know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth.
- Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
"They made you pay for bread
For sky earth water sleep
And for the poverty
of your lives."
The ruling elites, trained in business schools and managerial programs, are not equipped to confront the existential problems caused by climate catastrophe. They are trained to maintain, no matter the cost, the systems of global capitalism. They are systems managers. They lack the intellectual capacity and imagination to search for solutions outside the narrow parameters of global capitalism.
- Chris Hedges, Saving the Planet Means Overthrowing the Ruling Elites
"Night is also a sun," and the absence of myth is also a myth: the coldest, the purest, the only true myth."
“A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.”
- Alfred Adler
"A break from eveerything is so needed."
"A break from eveerything is so needed."
"A break from eveerything is so needed."
"A break from eveerything is so needed."
"You are absolutely capable of creating the life you can't stop thinking about."
I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.
- Ralph Ellison
“Don’t underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear."
Wake up
From your slumber
You who have been heedless
Allow the light to rouse your heart
The spring has now arrived
Those who stood guard for the winter
Prepare to soar to the skies
- Sraliz
Do the visions keep you up at night?
"We turn to God for help when our foundations are shaking only to learn it is God who is shaking them."
There are no boundaries no restrictions
You have entered a new world
Be careful where you put your energy.
"Do not worrry. None of this will be remembered next century."
- Patrick Mimran
"a painting in a museum
hears more ridiculous
opinions than anything else
in the world"
- Edmont de Goncourt
"If you understand how frequently people cope by projecting you would take absolutely nothing personally."
Every belief that we hold is a self fulfilling prophecy and the universe will always prove you're right.
- Alberto Villoido
The universe is talking to you
Through everything around you.
Science is the poetry of reality.
- Richard Dawkins
The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.
- Nikola Tesla
You are the universe expressing itself as a human for a little while.
Happiness is when what you think,
what you say and what you do are in harmony.
No matter how long you traveled in the wrong direction, you can always turn around.
Finding yourself is actually returning to yourself. An unlearning, an excavation, a remembering who you were before the world got its hands on you.
Understanding that the self is probably some mental construct and possibly not real, lets you look into the question of what you are. If you look deep enough, you will find liberation or, liberation finds itself again.
He looks through the wound of my life like it's light so I let him.
- Omotara James, “Pier 52”
Growth is painful, change is painful, but nothing is as painful as staying stuck somewhere you don't belong.
I have always been that kind of man who has no respect to books and literature.
- Witold Gombrowicz
Besides, nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
"I want to start my life over again
from the beginning."
Even though it's difficult to be a human being, let's not turn into monsters.
- Hong Sang-Soo, "On The Occasion of Remembering The Turning Gate"
"When you place a rotten fruit next to the other, the other will become rotten too. The same happens with people."
How can I describe my life to you?
I think a lot, I listen to music, I'm fond of flowers.
For a day, just for one day,
Talk about that which disturbs no one
And bring some peace into your
Beautiful eyes.
- Hafiz
"You wouldn’t believe what once or
twice I have seen. I’ll just
tell you this:
only if there are angels in your head will you
ever, possibly, see one."
"I will cut adrift, I will sit on pavements and drink coffee, I will dream; I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim."
Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again.
- Joseph Campbell
What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
"Stop carrying old feelings into new experiences."
"Angels went in and out of you."
- Yvan Goll, "For Liliane"
Nurse
Your hands, may I presume, are clean of blood?
Phaedra
My hands are clean. It is my heart that's stained.
- Eurypides, "Hippolytus"
"FEAR = FALSE EVIDENCE APPEARING REAL"
Love sometimes wants to do us a great favor: hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out.
- Hafiz
“The words you speak become the house you live in.”
- Hafiz
Poems are
unsaid
not said.
- David Meltzer, "zone"
“The world is full of omens, and you pick the ones you liked.”
- terry pratchett, i shall wear midnight
The elements of impulse
subtle
and everywhere - ask any lover.
How sweet all things would seem
Were we in that kind land to live together,
And there love slow and long,
There love and die among
Those scenes that image you, that sumptuous weather.
- Charles Baudelaire, “L’Invitation au Voyage”
"I give it my own meaning."
"I had to abandon human logic to feel my soul."
"You are the universe experiencing itself."
"You don't hate yourself.
You hate not being yourself."
"Are you
still you?"
"Never admire a man by his strength. Judge him in how he uses it."
The Greek philosophers went through life secretly feeling that everybody who was not a philosopher was a slave. Their pride overflowed at the thought that even the most powerful men on earth belonged among their slaves.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.
- Carl Jung
In traditional Buddhism the soul is something that can be dissolved and is not permanent. In fundamental buddhism you don’t have a soul. In Tibetan buddhism they say, that may be, but it’s possible for you to make a soul. So the Tibetan idea is that you can construct a soul. But they don’t follow the Christians who say that you’re born with one. They say, no, you’re not born with anything. The soul is only born in proportion to the amount of work that you put into it.
- Allan Pittman, Bryan Lynch
- Anything beyond what’s called consensus medicine, and it’s called that because it doesn’t even have any connection to the evidence, it is not evidence-based, it’s just, they all agree on it, and they just gonna keep doing it.
- So in this consensus like in psychiatry, it is kind of like you don’t criticize the system, you just work within that system?
- Yes, why would you bother, it can get you in trouble. Why would you bother reading science as a doctor, who cares, you just do what you are told to do, you don’t question it. Conventional medicine wants you to believe that it’s your inborn genetic chemical imbalance. And that is the premise, and it’s not just in psychiatry, it’s in all conventional medicine.
Kelly Brogan, interview, https://kellybroganmd.com/the-joe-rogan-experience-with-kelly-brogan/
"It’s something I push frequently when people claim science has having „the truth.” Science determines the most likely probability, no more than that."
Psychoanalysis is the giver of infantile, junior high school truths. Out of it, we are being told in a brutal and hasty way things that shock us and because of that, make us listen. It is common, and in this case it is so, that simplification, which even though may touch the truth, but in reality is banal, is worth more or less the same as deceit.
- Stanisław Lem, "Głos Pana"
There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.
- Daniel Dennett
"I once worked as a writer for a big New York ad agency. Our boss used to tell us: Invent a disease. Come up with the disease, he said, and we can sell the cure.
Attention Deficit Disorder, Seasonal Affect Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder. These aren’t diseases, they’re marketing plays. Doctors didn’t discover them, copywriters did. Marketing depts did. Drug companies did.
Depression and anxiety may be real. But they can also be Resistance.
When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul’s call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers. We’re doing exactly what TV commercials and pop materialist culture have been brainwashing us to do from birth. Instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work, we simply consume a product."
People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.
- Charles Bukowski
"So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
- Jane Hirshfield, The Weighing
"I think people forget that having an experience does not necessarily mean skydiving or partying till 5 am. It also means having a meaningful conversation on a quiet Saturday night."
"Because you are defined not by life's imperfect moments but by your reaction to them."
"You become more peaceful person when you don't react to people that use you as a mirror for their own self-hate."
"Transmute the lies of shadowed substance that arrest your spirit’s upward soaring. Realize that conditions of human limitation are but ghosts that parade upon the stage of mortal existence, only to be laid to rest forever by eternal Reality."
"That which pervades the entire body you should know to be indestructible. No one is able to destroy that imperishable soul.
For the soul there is neither birth nor death at any time. He has not come into being, does not come into being, and will not come into being. He is unborn, eternal, ever existing, and primeval. He is not slain when his body is slain."
- Bhagavad Gita
Everything is possible to him who wills only what is true! Rest in Nature, study, know, then dare; dare to will, dare to act and be silent!
- Eliphas Levi
Silence is no weakness of language.
It is, on the contrary, its strength.
It is the weakness of words not to know this.
- Edmond Jabès, Book of Shares
I've never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved.
- Marguerite Duras, The Lover
"I will reemove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh."
"I woke up.
A voice said:
You don’t have
to go
anywhere. You
just have to
make yourself ready.
Everything
will come by
itself."
"I am certain you can see how utterly important it is that your thinking become geared to new possibilities in order to function free of human restrictions and the dampening of a divine ardor by those who say „Impossible!” because they do not know. Let me say to all in freedom's name, "Try.""
There is nothing more to controlling demons than to do good and fear nothing.
- Eliphas Levi
For the theourgoí do not fall under the fate-governed herd.
- Chaldean Oracles
At the end of sciences there is God.
- paraphrasing a Rosicrucian
"True knowledge stems not from the authority of others, nor from a blind allegiance to antiquated dogmas,” he said. His biographers write that he believed knowledge “is a highly personal experience - a light that is communicated only to the innermost privacy of the individual through the impartial channels of all knowledge and of all thought.
- Roger Bacon
The Templars would stay in Palestine and learn from the natives - the remnants of the Jewish esoteric cults, early Christians, and the mystic heretics of Islam. They would stay and drink in a thousand wonders and new ideas that passed like caravans through the crossroads of the world that was XII-century Jeerusalem. They would dine on delicacies they’d never tasted, hear music they’d never heard before and listen to stories, histories and philosophies that they never knew existed. In short order they would become the most Easternized Westerners in the world - men who saw the bigger picture of life and culture - men who dreamed greater dreams than those of their fellow Europeans - men who tasted the forbidden fruit of knowledge - their eyes were opened and they became as gods.
- Lon Milo Duquette
In 1803 he refuses to play for the King of Prussia, a year or two later he refused an invitation to play for the empress in Vienna. He sent her a note back saying ’I’m busy today but I might stop by tomorrow’. In 1804, he says to Prince Carl Lichnowsky: ’Prince, what you are, you are by accident of birth. What I am, I am through myself. There have been and still will be thousands of princes. There’s only one Beethoven.
- Craig M. Wright
You are about to see a lot of highly intuitive people go into hermit mode or just not willing to be as open as they used to be. Spirit is calling for us to be very selective with whom we share our gifts and visions.
@TheeOracle7
"Only prisoners have time to read. If you want to engage in a twenty-year long research project you will have to kill someone."
- Mark Fisher
" As for me I will not hold back my tongue; I will give my voice to my torment, I will protest the bitterness of my life."
"Write something every day, she said,
even if it's only a line,
it will protect you."
- Clarice Lispector
Your love made everything fresh, pure, unburdening my destiny.
- Anna de Noailles, “Dazzled, Precise”
If you first put your spiritual life in order, everything else falls into place. Then your emotional and material life must, sooner or later, support your spiritual choices. In other words, if you spend less time worrying about the everyday details and commit more time to unleashing your spiritual potential, then the solutions to your everyday problems will naturally emerge as flashes of intuition or realization.
- Chrissie and Gary Blaze
"To live is to be other. It's not even possible to feel, if one feels today what he felt yesterday."
Spinoza is not among those who think that a sad passion has something good about it. Before Nietzsche, he denounces all the falsifications of life, all the values in the name of which we disparage life. We do not live, we only lead a semblance of life; we can only think of how to keep from dying, and our whole life is a death worship.
- Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza : Practical Philosophy
"Books read us back to ourselves. The escape into another story reminds us that we too are another story. Not caught, not confined, not predestined."
We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations6
"The spiritual journey is even more misunderstood. Having a mindfulness practice is acceptable, marketed as good for your health. But God forbid you go beyond the five senses into the ineffable fabric of cosmic reality. God forbid you actually have spiritual experience."
"I remember looking at them and thinking, you can’t help me, you don’t have a clue what reality is."
I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. I don’t think it’s a privilege or an indulgence, it’s not even a quest. I think it’s almost like knowledge, which is to say, it’s what we were born for.
- Toni Morrison
Even if Mozart came to the record label with his material, they would refuse to release him.
- Kora
I haven’t read Ligotti, but yes, I find meaninglessness totally liberating. That’s not to say I don’t believe in meaning, I just take great solace in how slippery it is. Meaning is always political, because when it gets bound up with institutions of power it is often used as a weapon, as a way to police. I guess, as someone who suffers because of such weapons, I tend toward the places where meaning is fugitive, exiled, banished, and the fact that it can shapeshift - that meaning is ultimately an invention, a costume that can be worn or taken off - is not just a consolation, but a strategy for how to think and live that helps me get by.
- ‘I Was Raised by Witches’: Johanna Hedva
"Words are bridges.
And they are traps, jails, wells."
"The creation and institutional dissemination of psychiatry was only possible with the extensive financial support of Gilded Age industrial capital, most notably the Rockefeller Foundation. The origin story of psychiatry is thus one of industrial capital investing a portion of its stupefying profits, not into the production of goods, but into the institutionalization of a new form of knowledge, one that could produce a consensus around the medical character of social ills."
Tomorrow morning surely will
Be jubilant and nice
And life is simply gorgeous still,
My heart, you must be wise.
Exhausted and worn bare,
You beat so faintly, gasping...
You know, I've read somewhere
That souls are everlasting.
- Anna Achmatova
Time is tricky. You have whole months, even years, when nothing changes a speck, when you don’t go anywhere or do anything or think one new thought. And then you can get hit with a day, or an hour, or a half a second when so much happens it’s almost like you got born all over again into some brand-new person you for damn sure never expected to meet.
- E.R. Frank
Most people are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never in the now.
- Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
J, said You don’t believe in God? And I said, No. I believe in this connection we all have to nature, to each other, to the universe. And she said, Yeah, God.
- Ada Limón, “What it Looks Like to Us and the Words We Use,” Bright Dead Things
Albert Einstein was once giving an exam paper to his graduating class. It turned out that it was the exact same exam paper he had given them the previous year. His teaching assistant, alarmed at what he saw and thinking it to be the result of the professor’s absent-mindedness, alerted Einstein.
”Excuse me, sir. It’s about the test you just handed out.”
Einstein waited patiently.
”I’m not sure if you realize it, but this is the same test you gave out last year. In fact, it’s identical.”
Einstein paused to think for a moment, then said,
”Yes, it is the same test but the answers have changed.”
"But it's so hard, life. Nothing is interesting. Everything's been made oridinary in our eyes. I want magic and miracles. I want a Jesus to come and change things again and show the invisible."
"You are so in your head you can't even enjoy where you are."
Do you not know this world is a waking dream?
- Izumi Shikibu, Another Answer; The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems
"It's time to let go of the old."
Tell me what was I like before I existed.
— Agha Shahid Ali, Existed; The Veiled Suite
To learn something by being nothing.
- Mary Oliver, Entering The Kingdom
The two other central motifs of Lurianic kabbalah: shevira (the breaking of the ves- sels) and tikkun (repair of the worlds)."
— Window of The Soul
"Maybe the journey isn't so much about becoming anything. Maybe it's about un-becoming everything that isn't really you, so you can be who you were meant to be."
I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing hearing and feeling are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.
- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
“In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.”
— Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics
I missed the smell of plants I could not name, the sound of birds I could not name, the murmur of languages I could not name.
- Deborah Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know
there are stars in your eyes,
and stars around your halo.
you have fire in your throat,
and fire in your veins.
you're surrounded by ethreal light,
and a million eyes.
you are celestial,
terrifying,
a murmur of a god.
"You have so much light the plants grow towards you."
It has made me better, loving you.
- Henry James
"Don't resist your transformation."
"People think I'm anti-social because I don't join their conversations. The truth is, I don't give a damn what they're talking about most of time."
Solitude, an intoxicating sense of freedom.
- Colette
"If anyone asks where I am, I've left the country."
"They think you're crazy when you talk about things they don't understand."
"It was nice to hear your voice."
"I want to talk to you more."
"I need you so much closer."
"I don't know who you are but I love you."
"I don't know how to love
"I don't know how to love you."
"Dear loves I never met."
"Why produce a work of art
when it's nice just to dream about it?"
“All good things are powerful stimulants to life, even a good book written against life.”
"- Hey, what's the meaning of life?
- Love."
"If you can't explain it to a six years old, you don't understand it yourself."
- Albert Einstein
"You know so much
And you don't know anything."
"Sick of all these people talking."
"I wish you'd get out of my life and shut up."
"Prison? I'm imprisoned everywhere."
"The soul is sick and tired of its too solid shell."
"Do you ever miss yourself?"
"You haven't met all of you yet."
“There are people we meet in life who miss being important to us by inches, days, or heartbeats. Another place or time or a different emotional frame of mind and we would willingly fall into their arms; gladly take up their challenges or invitation. But as it is, we encounter them when we are discontent or content and they are not. Whatever they are, we are not and vice versa. Two trains going in different directions that pass for a few powerful moments at full speed, blasting noise and wind but then they are gone. Whatever serious chemistry might have been possible if, isn’t.”
"Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach 18."
- Albert Einstein
"Baby, if I don't feel it,
I ain't faking, no, no."
"If someone makes you feel, let them."
"You are always in my heart."
(talks bullshit about love)
(in her head)
What does a crook know about love?
(talks bullshit about love)
(out loud)
What does a crook know about love?
Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.
- Montaigne
"- What's wrong with you?
- You're what's wrong with me."
Then she said, If someone killed you would you want to come back for revenge? No, I said, I’d rather come back to the people I loved. What if you came back to someone and they’d forgotten you? she said. I’d tell them I loved them anyway.”
- Marie Howe, Adaptation, “Magdalene: Poems”
"It was a pleasure to call you my friend."
"You never really know people, even those you love."
"Every time I judge someone else, I reveal an unhealed part of myself."
"Don't let the ugliness in others kill the beauty in you."
"And up till this day, I have his words inside me, like an insert in the body."
"The things that excite you are not random. They are connected to your purpose. Follow them."
"Your big ideas are worth pursuing."
"Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song."
- Mary Oliver, "Three Songs", West Wind
"The sea speaks more honestly to those willing to drown."
"I fantasize about dying while listening to this song."
"I don't wanna really be around too many people or do too much talking."
"Things that make you want to enjoy your life again."
"Things that make you want to enjoy your life again."
"Things that make you want to enjoy your life again."
"I hate that I can't tell you this."
"Help somebody feel better."
"People aren't against you. They are for themselves."
"Go where you feel the most alive."
"Life is true, life is real,
And death is not it's goal.
From dust you are, and to
Dust you return,
Was never said about the soul."
"But I neeed to feel beautiful and holy things around me, always: music, mystery cults, symbols, myths. I need it and I refuse to give it up. That's my fatal flaw."
"I'd rather write about this system than live in it and I'd rather play music and day and read and wander around in bookstores and watch humans but not be one of them."
"I don't need to prove anything for you."
"I don't need to prove anything for you."
"I don't need to prove anything for you."
"I don't need to prove anything for you."
"Radical softness as a boundless form of resistance."
"If you don't know what is the matter, the matter is energy, the reason is the soul."
"During Cosmic Consciousness ontologic questions are fully answered by one’s state of being, and verbal questions are not to the point. Eventually, when the Cosmic Consciousness faded, I cried both for joy and sadness, because I knew that my life would never be the same."
Wishing things to be other then they are leads to re’ut ruach or ra’yon ruach. These idioms, often translated as ”chasing the wind,” actually mean ”disturbing the breath.”
"God offers only awe. The beginning of wisdom is awe."
"Jewish wisdom, chochmah in Hebrew, isn’t as much a body of knowledge to be mastered, as it is a lifelong project to be undertaken."
"Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, humankind now possesses enormous knowledge, awesome power, and little wisdom. And that is a potentially lethal combination. As Robert Sternberg, former president of the American Psychological Association lamented, ”If there is anything the world needs, it is wisdom. Without it, I exaggerate not at all in saying that very soon, there may be no world.”
"The Hebrew God is not a noun but a verb; not a being or even the Supreme Being, but be-ing itself. This grammatical insight is the basis for the pantheism of much of Jewish mystical teaching. The XVI-century kabbalist, Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, for example, defines God this way: God is found in all things and all things are found in God, and there is nothing devoid of divinity, heaven forfend. Everything is in God, and God is in everything and beyond, and there is nothing beside God."
When you realize you are the part of the cosmic that embraces and transcends the microcosmic everything you do is imbued with meaning. Hence, the Zen saying: „How wonderful! How marvelous! I chop wood! I carry water!
"This is what Sufis call the Supreme Identity. You have realized your fundamental identity with the Condition of all conditions and the Nature of all natures and the Being of all beings. Such spirit is perfectly compatibile with all things. It is even nothing special. It is chop wood, carry water. For this reason, individuals who reach this state are often depicted as very oridinary people, nothing special about them. This is thee path of sages, of the wise men and women who are so wise you can’t even spot it."
"It is said of the Ouroboros that he slays himself and brings himself to life, fertilizes himself and gives birth to himself."
"If it's so clear, why don't we see it."
"I walked out of the fire alive;
How can that be?"
"None of you are here by accident. We all came looking for this song."
- Rotcod
"Forever, foreever, my brother's friend."
“If your light makes them uncomfortable, it’s because it reminds them of their own darkness.”