Great Throughts Treasury

"Become dust - and they will throw thee in the air; Become stone - and they will throw thee on glass."

"But inner experience is only one source of human knowledge."

"But only a brief moment is granted to the brave one breath or two, whose wage is the long nights of the grave."

"But the perception of life as an organic unity is a slow achievement, and depends for its growth on a people's entry into the main current of world-events."

"But the universe, as a collection of finite things, presents itself as a kind of island situated in a pure vacuity to which time, regarded as a series of mutually exclusive moments, is nothing and does nothing."

"Conduct, which involves a decision of the ultimate fate of the agent cannot be based on illusions."

"Divine life is in touch with the whole universe on the analogy of the soul's contact with the body."

"I have never considered myself a poet. I have no interest in poetic artistry."

"I have seen the movement of the sinews of the sky, And the blood coursing in the veins of the moon."

"If faith is lost, there is no security and there is no life for him who does not adhere to religion."

"In the first period religious life appears as a form of discipline which the individual or a whole people must accept as an unconditional command without any rational understanding of the ultimate meaning and purpose of that command."

"Inductive reason, which alone makes man master of his environment, is an achievement; and when once born it must be reinforced by inhibiting the growth of other modes of knowledge."

"It is true that we are made of dust. And the world is also made of dust. But the dust has motes rising."

"It may, however, be said that the level of experience to which concepts are inapplicable cannot yield any knowledge of a universal character, for concepts alone are capable of being socialized."

"Man is primarily governed by passion and instinct."

"Physiologically less violent and psychologically more suitable to a concrete type of mind."

"Sexual self-restraint is only a preliminary stage in the ego's evolution."

"Since love first made the breast an instrument Of fierce lamenting, by its flame my heart Was molten to a mirror, like a rose I pluck my breast apart, that I may hang This mirror in your sight."

"That is why, according to this newer psychology, Christianity has already fulfilled its biological mission, and it is impossible for the modern man to understand its original significance."

"The Ego is partly free, partly determined, and reaches fuller freedom by approaching the Individual who is most free: God."

"The possibility of a scientific treatment of history means a wider experience, a greater maturity of practical reason, and finally a fuller realization of certain basic ideas regarding the nature of life and time."

"The scientific observer of Nature is a kind of mystic seeker in the act of prayer."

"The soul is neither inside nor outside the body; neither proximate to nor separate from it."

"The standpoint of the man who relies on religious experience for capturing Reality must always remain individual and incommunicable."

"The thought of a limit to perceptual space and time staggers the mind."

"The truth is that the religious and the scientific processes, though involving different methods, are identical in their final aim. Both aim at reaching the most real."

"The ultimate aim of the ego is not to see something, but to be something."

"The ultimate purpose of religious life is to make this evolution move in a direction far more important to the destiny of the ego than the moral health of the social fabric which forms his present environment."

"The wing of the Falcon brings to the king, the wing if the crow brings him to the cemetery."

"Thou art not for the earth, nor for the Heaven the world is for thee, thou art not for the world."

"Though the terror of the sea gives to none security, in the secret of the shell. Self-preserving we may dwell."

"Thus passing through the infinite varieties of space we reach the Divine space which is absolutely free from all dimensions and constitutes the meeting point of all infinities."

"Why hast thou made me born in this country, the inhabitant of which is satisfied with being a slave?"

"Yet higher religion, which is only a search for a larger life, is essentially experience and recognized the necessity of experience as its foundation long before science learnt to do so."