Clergy

"We all more or less consciously note this. We cannot help observing that all serious conversations gravitate towards philosophy."

"[about the Latin phrase time Jesum transeuntem et non revertentem ("Dread the passage of Jesus, for He does not return.")] This amounts to saying: do not let religious intuitions escape you, for they do not come twice."

"A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers. There exists some book, pamphlet, article in an encyclopaedia, or possibly an old clipping from a newspaper that once set you thinking; there may be many; indeed you may be one of those rare beings with whom a few lines of print are food enough or thought because, as Lamartine says, their thoughts think themselves. The sometimes evocative for you may be poetry, history, philosophy, the sciences, or moral sciences, i.e. the progress of mankind. Some people who go to sleep over a volume will be interested by a review which they think more condensed or better within their reach. Read reviews if they help you to think, that is. to say if they leave in your mind images that will go on living when you have forgotten where they came from. Read a Shakespeare calendar at the rate of four lines a day, if Shakespeare quotations have on you the magic influence they have on some people; read algebra, read the lives of great inventors or of great businessmen, read that kind of books which you and nobody else know to be thought-productive for you."

"Most people suspend their judgment till somebody else has expressed his own and then they repeat it. Common parlance alludes to this weakness in the frequently heard phrase: PEOPLE DO NOT THINK."

"Too often we forget that genius, too, depends upon the data within its reach, that even Archimedes could not have devised Edison's inventions. We also forget that genius is not genius all the time, although it is superior all the time."

"Personality is the knowledge that we are apart from the rest of the universe."

"Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves."

"Social intercourse, with its … hypocrisy … is highly productive of thought-hindering insincerity."

"The more a man thinks the better adapted he becomes to thinking, and education is nothing if it is not the methodical creation of the habit of thinking. Precisely. Theoretically, education is a mental training aiming at greater intellectual elasticity, but the question is whether education does not often strain, instead of train, a mind."

"Ideas are the root of creation."

"Very busy people always find time for everything. Conversely, people with immense leisure find time for nothing."

"You are not to disbelieve human science or think human reason invalid except when they venture outside their province."

"Where the writer produces that combination of perfect technique, human interest, and thruth, and can add to it that supreme touch, the perfection of art has been attained."

"Saints do not die. It is their lot, To die while on this earth to all that God is not."

"The vengeful God of wrath and punishment is a mere fairytale. It simply is the Me That makes me fail."

"In waste God hides the gold, accept what He may send, The great within the small, though we don't comprehend."

"No ray of Light can shine if severed from its source. Without my inner Light I lose my course."

"No man has known perfect felicity, Until his otherness is drowned in unity"

"So high above all things that be. Is God uplifted, man can dare. No utterance: he prayeth best. When Silence is his sum of prayer"

"Unless you find paradise at your own center, there is not the smallest chance That you may enter"

"I know God couldn't live a moment without me; if I should disappear, He would die, destitute"

"No thought for the hereafter have the wise, for on this very earth they live in paradise"

"Even before I was me, I was God in God; And I can be once again, as soon as I am dead to myself"

"Time is eternity and eternity is time, just as long as you yourself don't make them different"

"All heaven's glory is within and so is hell's fierce burning. You must yourself decide in which direction you are turning"

"Love is alike to death, annihilates the senses, My heart it breaks as well, the spirit's drawn from hence"

"The Spirit is like new wine, see the disciples all, Like men inebriate, swept away and enthralled By both its heat and strength; thus it remains true still That the disciples had of sweetest wine their fill"

"If thou dost love a Something, Man, Thou lovest naught that doth abide. God is not This nor That—do thou Leave Somethings utterly aside"

"He has not lived in vain who learns to be unruffled by loss, by gain, by, joy, by pain."

"How short our span! If you once realized how brief, you would refrain from causing any beast or man the smallest grief, the slightest pain."

"The Cross on Golgotha Thou lookest to in vain, Unless within thine heart It be set up again"

"The Wise Man is that which he hath. The precious Pearl of Paradise Wouldst thou not lose, then must thou be Thyself that Pearl of greatest price."

"The World doth not imprison thee. Thou art thyself the World, and there, Within thyself, thou hold'st thyself Thy self-imprisoned Prisoner."

"Though Christ a thousand times in Bethleham be born And not within thyself, Thy soul will be forlorn"

"Christ was born a man for me, for me he died - Unless I become God through Him, His birth is mocked His death denied"

"Though Jesus Christ in Bethlehem A thousand times his Mother bore, Is he not born again in thee Then art thou lost for evermore."

"True prayer requires no word, no chant no gesture, no sound. It is communion, calm and still with our own godly Ground"

"God far exceeds all words that we can here express In silence He is heard, in silence worshiped best"

"If you know how to launch your ship into God's sea Oh, what a blessed fate, submerged in it to be"

"Two eyes our souls possess: While one is turned on time, The other seeth things Eternal and sublime"

"Although the influence of Boehme was to be felt far and wide, ranging from French and German theosophers and esoterists to Russian contemplatives, perhaps the most artistically powerful expression of purely sapiential teachings deeply influenced by him are to be found in the hymns of Christian gnosis which comprise the Cherubic Wanderer of Angelus Silesius (1624-1677) which are also among the most remarkable works of German literature. This collection, so close in both form and content to Sufi poetry, is based upon the central theme of return to God...it is the al-ma'rifah of Islam or the jnana of Hinduism and very much in accord with works of such nature whether they be in Arabic and Persian or Sanskrit."

"Meister Eckhart, Jacob Boehme and Angelus Silesius describe their spiritual vision of the sublime and ultimate reality of God, as well as their participation therein, by a dramatic use of the power of imagery of the German language which, although rooted in time and space, seems to be free from the constraints of these elements. Time and space alone are incapable of grasping eternity; only when struck by a shaft of eternal light can they reflect its splendor. Such a reflection of the eternal is present in the language of Meister Eckhart, Jacob Boehme and Angelus Silesius. It is, more-over, the light of eternity that makes it at all possible to see the teachings of these great metaphysicians and mystics as a unity, in spite of their having lived at different times and belonged to differing Christian confessions. The uniformity of their spiritual vision arises from the inner unity of Divine Reality itself. Human language becomes inadequate when confronted with this mystery of the inner unity of the Godhead; “the most beautiful statement about God of which man is capable is his silence in the face of his inner riches.”...Angelus Silesius summarized his spiritual vision in rhymes whose beauty is filled with an inner certainty that derives directly from the knowledge of the divine being. This direct knowledge of God is founded on the identity of essence between God and the soul, which occurs when the soul once more corresponds to its original state of being created in the image of God."

"Many years ago in lovely Lindau on the Bodensee, I happened upon a thin volume of Angelus Silesius' couplets which startled, amused and greatly interested me. Although it was in 1657 the world had first received them it seemed to me that they had lost little of their significance in 300 years. Their pithy comments upon human frailty, their wholesome attempt to direct a way toward peace of mind, their often half concealed humor, have modern application."

"I will end with a great line by the poet who, in the seventeenth century, took the strangely real and poetic name of Angelus Silesius. It is the summary of all I have said tonight — except that I have said it by means of reasoning and simulated reasoning. I will say it first in Spanish and then in German: La rosa es sin porqué; florece porque florece. Die Rose ist ohne warum; sie blühet weil sie blühet"

"I have been told that Queen Christina had a decided leaning toward this opinion, and as M. Naude, who was her librarian, was imbued with it, he probably communicated to her what he knew of the secret views of the celebrated philosophers with whom he had had intercourse in Italy. Spinoza, who admits only one substance, is not far removed from the doctrine of a single, universal spirit, and even the New Cartesians, who claim that God alone acts, establish it likewise without noticing it. Apparently Molinos and several other New Quietists, among others, a certain Joannes Angelus Silesius, who wrote before Molinos and some of whose works have recently been reprinted, and even Weigelius before them, embraced this opinion of the Sabbath or rest of souls in God. This is why they believed that the cessation of particular functions was the highest state of perfection."

"A spark without its fire, a drop without its sea, Without rebirth what more, pray, wouldst thou be?"

"God is a flowing well which constantly may pour Into his whole Creation, and yet be as before."

"Never in endless time will ring a sound as sweetly As when a human heart in God is tuned completely."

"God, being a great abyss, to men his depth reveals Who climb the highest peak of the eternal hills"

"In schools throughout the world God's but described to you. Within the spirit's school one sees and loves him too."