Category: the point

Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love.

— Simone Weil (as quoted by Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 233)

Pai Chang said, “All sayings and writings return to one’s self.”

— Blue Cliff Record (Cleary and Cleary 1977, 490)

What do you mean by that?

Only he who has a spirit of extreme humility can be said to have a resolute intellect.

— Gandhi (1926, 47)

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

— T.S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’

Stand before it and there is no beginning.
Follow it and there is no end.
Stay with the ancient Tao,
Move with the present.

— Tao Te Ching 14 (Feng/English)

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

— Maslow, The Psychology of Science

We live inside a dream.

Seekers of gold dig up much earth and find little.

— Heraclitus (D.22, Kahn VIII)

He who knows he has enough is rich.

— Tao Te Ching 33 (Feng/English)

Too much is not enough.

— anon

Wisdom asks nothing more.

— Wallace Stevens, Adagia

I can’t forget
I can’t forget
but I don’t remember what.

— Leonard Cohen

It darkles (tinct, tint) all this our funnaminal world. Yon marshpond by ruodmark verge is visited by the tide. Alvemmarea! We are circumveiloped by obscuritas.

— The Restored Finnegans Wake, 192

I can’t forget
I can’t forget
but I don’t remember who.

— Leonard Cohen

The mar of murmury mermers to the mind’s ear, uncharted rock, evasive weed. Only the caul knows his thousandfirst name, Hocus Crocus, Esquilocus, Finnfinn the Faineant. Doth all this two way teleopic come aft to you, puritysnooper, as eft it were longtimes ofter when Potollomuck Sotyr or Sourdanapplous the Lollapaloosa put back Omega with the beths of alpability? The charges are, you will remember; the chances are, you won’t. We are recurrently meeting em, par Mahun Mesme, in cycloannalism, from space to space, time after time, in various phases of scripture as in various poses of sepulture.

— The Restored Finnegans Wake, 200-01

I can’t forget
I can’t forget
but I can’t remember what.

— Leonard Cohen

Security is mostly a superstition.

— Helen Keller, The Open Door

In insecurity to lie
Is joy’s insuring quality.

— Emily Dickinson (Johnson #1434)

Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.

— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?
And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:
And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

— Matthew 6:25, 28-9, 34 (KJV)

You are really the natural form of emptiness, so there is no need to fear.

— Tibetan Book of the Dead (Trungpa/Fremantle)

Firm as the thunderbolt, the seat of the seeker is established above the void.

— Kabir I.68 (Tagore 1915)

The Realized One comes from nowhere and goes nowhere; that is why he is called the Realized One.

— Diamond Sutra (Cleary 1998, 140)

Set the bird’s wings with gold and it will never again soar in the sky.

— Tagore, Stray Birds 231

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise

— from William Blake’s notebook