Related Quotes

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Remy de Gourmont

Try to put well in practice what you already know. In so doing, you will, in good time, discover the hidden things you now inquire about.

Good | Practice |

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Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach

We think, sometimes, there's not a dragon left. Not one brave knight, not a single princess gliding through secret forests, enchanting deer and butterflies with her smile. We think sometimes that ours is an age past frontiers, past adventures. Destiny, it's way over the horizon; glowing shadows galloped past long ago, and gone. What a pleasure to be wrong. Princesses, knights, enchantments and dragons, mystery and adventure... not only are they here-and-now, they're all that ever lived on earth! Our century, they've changed clothes, of course. Dragons wear government-costumes, today, and failure-suits and disaster-outfits. Society's demons screech, whirl down on us should we lift our eyes from the ground, dare we turn right at corners we've been told to turn left. So crafty have appearances become that princesses and knights can be hidden from each other, can be hidden from themselves. Yet masters of reality still meet us in dreams to tell us that we've never lost the shield we need against dragons, that blue-fire voltage arcs through us now to change our world as we wish. Intuition whispers true: We're not dust, we're magic!

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Richard Taylor

We see only a part of the surface of things. The rest will be forever hidden from us, to be appreciated for its felt but unfathomed presence.

Rest | Will |

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Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies

Here a beautiful star shines clearly; here a constellation is hidden by a branch; a universe by a leaf. Some mental instrument or organon is required to enable us to distinguish between the leaf which may be removed and a real void: when to cease to look in one direction, and to work in another.

Distinguish | Universe | Work |

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Richard Wright, fully Richard Nathaniel Wright

My mother's suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking, the uncertainty, the fear, the dread; the meaningless pain and the endless suffering. Her life set the emotional tone of my life, colored the men and women I was to meet in the future, conditioned my relation to events that had not yet happened, determined my attitude to situations and circumstances I had yet to face. A somberness of spirit that I was never to lose settled over me during the slow years of my mother's unrelieved suffering, a somberness that was to make me stand apart and look upon excessive joy with suspicion, that was to make me keep forever on the move, as though to escape a nameless fate seeking to overtake me. At the age of twelve, before I had one year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion as to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering. At the age of twelve I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me seek those areas of living that would keep it alive, that was to make me skeptical of everything while seeking everything, tolerant of all and yet critical. The spirit I had caught gave me insight into the sufferings of others, made me gravitate toward those whose feelings were like my own, made me sit for hours while others told me of their lives, made me strangely tender and cruel, violent and peaceful. It made me want to drive coldly to the heart of every question and it open to the core of suffering I knew I would find there. It made me love burrowing into psychology, into realistic and naturalistic fiction and art, into those whirlpools of politics that had the power to claim the whole of men's souls. It directed my loyalties to the side of men in rebellion; it made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.

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Richard Wright, fully Richard Nathaniel Wright

It made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.

Awe | Love | Sense | Wonder |

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Rita Mae Brown

Language asserts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.

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Robert Altman, fully Robert Bernard Altman

Words don't tell you what people are thinking. Rarely do we use words to really tell. We use words to sell people or to convince people or to make them admire us. It's all disguise. It's all hidden -- a secret language.

People | Words |

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Robertson Davies

It is mankind's discovery of language which more than any other single thing has separated him from the animal creation. Without language, what concept have we of past or future as separated from the immediate present? Without language, how can we tell anyone what we feel, or what we think? It might be said that until he developed language, man had no soul, for without language how could he reach deep inside himself and discover the truths that are hidden there, or find out what emotions he shared, or did not share, with his fellow men and women. But because this greatest gift of all gifts is in daily use, and is smeared, and battered and trivialized by commonplace associations, we too often forget the splendor of which it is capable, and the pleasures that it can give, from the pen of a master.

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Robert Bridges, fully Robert Seymour Bridges

Tis the good reader that makes the good book...in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear.

Good |

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Robert Frost

To Earthward - Love at the lips was touch As sweet as I could bear; And once that seemed too much; I lived on air That crossed me from sweet things, The flow of--was it musk From hidden grapevine springs Downhill at dusk? I had the swirl and ache From sprays of honeysuckle That when they're gathered shake Dew on the knuckle. I craved strong sweets, but those Seemed strong when I was young; The petal of the rose It was that stung. Now no joy but lacks salt, That is not dashed with pain And weariness and fault; I crave the stain Of tears, the aftermark Of almost too much love, The sweet of bitter bark And burning clove. When stiff and sore and scarred I take away my hand From leaning on it hard In grass and sand, The hurt is not enough: I long for weight and strength To feel the earth as rough To all my length.

Earth | Joy |

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Robert Frost

Back out of all this now too much for us, Back in a time made simple by the loss Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather, There is a house that is no more a house Upon a farm that is no more a farm And in a town that is no more a town. The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you Who only has at heart your getting lost, May seem as if it should have been a quarry— Great monolithic knees the former town Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered. And there’s a story in a book about it: Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest, The chisel work of an enormous Glacier That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole. You must not mind a certain coolness from him Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain. Nor need you mind the serial ordeal Of being watched from forty cellar holes As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins. As for the woods’ excitement over you That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves, Charge that to upstart inexperience. Where were they all not twenty years ago? They think too much of having shaded out A few old pecker-fretted apple trees. Make yourself up a cheering song of how Someone’s road home from work this once was, Who may be just ahead of you on foot Or creaking with a buggy load of grain. The height of the adventure is the height Of country where two village cultures faded Into each other. Both of them are lost. And if you’re lost enough to find yourself By now, pull in your ladder road behind you And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me. Then make yourself at home. The only field Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall. First there’s the children’s house of make-believe, Some shattered dishes underneath a pine, The playthings in the playhouse of the children. Weep for what little things could make them glad. Then for the house that is no more a house, But only a belilaced cellar hole, Now slowly closing like a dent in dough. This was no playhouse but a house in earnest. Your destination and your destiny’s A brook that was the water of the house, Cold as a spring as yet so near its source, Too lofty and original to rage. (We know the valley streams that when aroused Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.) I have kept hidden in the instep arch Of an old cedar at the waterside A broken drinking goblet like the Grail Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it, So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t. (I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.) Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

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Robert Collyer

Now, believe me, God hides some ideal in every human soul. At some time in our life we feel a trembling, fearful longing to do some good thing. Life finds its noblest spring of excellence in this hidden impulse to do our best.

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Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron

Thou livest, but not from any restricted season nor from any known period. Thou livest, but not through breath and soul, for Thou art soul of the soul. Thou livest, but not with the life of man, which is like unto vanity and its end the moth and the worm. Thou livest, and he who layeth hold of Thy secret shall find eternal delight: "He shall eat and live for ever."

Time | Vision |

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Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron

Thou art the God of Gods, and the Lord of Lords, Ruler of beings celestial and terrestrial, For all creatures are Thy witnesses And by the glory of this Thy name, every creature is bound to Thy service. Thou art God, and all things formed are Thy servants and worshippers. Yet is not Thy glory diminished by reason of those that worship aught beside Thee, For the yearning of them all is to draw nigh Thee, But they are like the blind, Setting their faces forward on the King’s highway, Yet still wandering from the path. One sinketh into the well of a pit And another falleth into a snare, But all imagine they have reached their desire, Albeit they have suffered in vain. But Thy servants are as those walking clear-eyed in the straight path, Turning neither to the right nor the left Till they come to the court of the King’s palace. Thou art God, by Thy Godhead sustaining all that hath been formed, And upholding in Thy Unity all creatures. Thou art God, and there is no distinction ’twixt Thy Godhead and Thy Unity, Thy pre-existence and Thy existence, For ’tis all one mystery. And although the name of each be different, "Yet they are all proceeding to one place."

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Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron

May this my prayer aid mankind The path of right and worth to find; The living God, His wondrous ways, Herein inspire my song of praise. Nor is the theme at undue length set down, Of all my hymns behold "The Royal Crown. Wonderful are thy works, as my soul overwhelmingly knoweth. Thine, O Lord, are the greatness and the might, the beauty, the triumph, and the splendour. Thine, O Lord, is the Kingdom, and Thou art exalted as head over all. Thine are all riches and honour: Thine the creatures of the heights and depths. They bear witness that they perish, while Thou endurest. Thine is the might in whose mystery our thoughts can find no stay, so far art Thou beyond us. In Thee is the veiled retreat of power, the secret and the foundation. p. 83 Thine is the name concealed from the sages, The force that sustaineth the world on naught, And that can bring to light every hidden thing. Thine is the loving-kindness that ruleth over all Thy creatures, And the good treasured up for those who fear Thee. Thine are the mysteries that transcend understanding and thought. Thine is the life over which extinction holdeth no sway, And Thy throne is exalted above every sovereignty, And Thy habitation hidden in the shrouded height. Thine is the existence from the shadow of whose light every being was created, Of which we say, in His shadow we live. Thine are the two worlds between which Thou hast set a boundary, The first for deeds and the second for reward. Thine is the reward which Thou for the righteous hast stored up and hidden, Yea, Thou sawest it was goodly and didst hide it.

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Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron

My heart craves to praise Thee, But I am unable. Would my understanding Were as spacious as Solomon’s. Without it my wisdom As yet ill suffices For expounding Thy wonders And Thy deeds of beneficence Wrought for me and all mankind. Without Thee all’s hopeless, And where is the rock Sustaining, suspending The weight of the world? I am as one orphaned; Nay, on Thee I am cast. What then can I do But look to Thee, wait on Thee, In whose hand is the spirit Of all that is living, In whose hand is the breath Of all the creation?

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Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron

Strayed in mid-youth, rouse up, nor sleep, for lo! The days of youth like clouds of smoke will pass. Ere evening falls, thou shalt be withered grass, Though morning saw thee like a lily blow. Why waste on ancestors a heated breath, Or note which progeny was Abraham’s? Whether his food be herbs or Bashan rams, Man, wretched wight, is on his way to death.

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Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron

Thou art One, the first of every number, and the foundation of every structure, Thou art One, and at the mystery of Thy Oneness the wise of heart are struck dumb, For they know not what it is. Thou art One, and Thy Oneness can neither be increased nor lessened, It lacketh naught, nor doth aught remain over. Thou art One, but not like a unit to be grasped or counted, For number and change cannot reach Thee. Thou art not to be visioned, nor to be figured thus or thus. Thou art One, but to put to Thee bound or circumference my imagination would fail me. Therefore I have said I will guard my ways lest I sin with the tongue. Thou art One, Thou art high and exalted beyond abasement or falling, "For how should the One fall?"

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Rudolf Otto

The truly mysterious ‘object’ is beyond our apprehension and comprehension, not only because our knowledge has certain irremovable limits, but because in it we come upon something inherently `wholly other’, whose kind and character are incommensurable with our own, and before which we therefore recoil in wonder that strikes us chill and numb.

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