Our Collection of Quotations

Week of the 23^rd January, 2005

When a passion consumes us, we know nothing but it. The longing for bliss, the promise of pleasure, the allure of desire that intoxicates us so. We never take heed of those wiser than our base desires. May we learn from others’ enchantments and their sometimes unbearable sufferings by way of trying to obtain them.

"Is love a tender thing? It is too rough, too rude, too boisterous and it pricks like thorns. /

These violent delights have violent ends / and in their triumph die like fire and powder / which as they kiss consume: the sweetest honey / loathsome in its own deliciousness. / Therefore, love moderately. / Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.”

~William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene VI

Week of the 16^th January, 2005

Sometimes by the grace of ordained circumstance we encounter a wisdom that seems at once to pervade and completely interrupt our traditional and normally comfortable thought-processes. This week’s quote is perhaps one of these revelations. Take the time to think about it, to immerse yourself in it, to let it completely subdue you. Touch its genius with your spirit.

O sweet memory, how ancient and cruel are thee.

“…above the artificial mill the real sky was gray; the wind wrinkled the Grand Lac with little wavelets, like a real lake; large birds swiftly crossed the Bois, like a real wood, and uttering sharp cries alighted one after another in the tall oaks which under their druidical crowns and with a Dodonean majesty seemed to proclaim the inhuman emptiness of the disused forest, and helped me better understand what a contradiction it is to search in reality for memory's pictures, which would never have the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from not being perceived by the senses. The reality I had known no longer existed. That Mme. S_____ did not arrive exactly the same at the same moment was enough to make the avenue different. The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time;

the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.”

~Marcel Proust, Du Coté de Chez Swann, A la Recherché du Temps Perdu

(Swann’s Way) (In Search of Lost Time)

Week of the 5^th December, 2004

This week’s quotation needs little foreword. The meanings and perhaps the warnings are intrinsic. Though I might still venture to add this prelusion, namely, that though we are aware of our shortcomings we are terribly inadequate to repair them; we more often embrace them. We need a reformation in the methods of educating our fellow human beings, in order that we not trip repeatedly yet blindly on those quite obvious “cracks in the sidewalk”.

"Human desires are insatiable, for we are endowed by nature with the power and the wish to desire everything and by fortune with the ability to obtain little of what we desire. The result is an unending discontent in the minds of men and a weariness with what they possess. This makes men curse the present, praise the past, and hope in the future, even though they do this with no reasonable motive."

~Machiavelli, The Disclosures

Week of the 28^th November, 2004

Resting on a mound of soft earth that is the countryside of our species (anywhere quiet in this now incessantly loud world), gazing upon the starry heavens above, our soul, as uncontrollably as nature’s discourse, attempts to reach out to our celestial neighbors and ask “Why? Do you know why? Please help us all understand!” Whenever we are vis-à-vis with the immensities of the universe, we seem quite naturally to ask this question in some form or another. Have you been answered? Maybe you have but you haven’t chosen to listen. Close your mind, just for a moment, and let your soul become the receptacle of Wisdom-at-large.

"I think; here I lie under a haystack....The tiny space I occupy is so infinitely small in comparison with the rest of space, in which I am not, and which has nothing to do with me; and the period of time in which it is my lot to live is so petty beside the eternity in which I have not been, and shall not be....And in this atom, this mathematical point, the blood is circulating, the brain is working and wanting something....Isn't it loathsome? Isn't it petty?"

~Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, Translated from the original Russian

Week of the 21^st November, 2004

Are you familiar with the term “Metanoia”? It is an ancient Greek word meaning, literally, ‘a changing of the mind’; a transformation of the methods of thought, if you will. It is a radical revision of our whole mental process. Metanoia means a new mind. About what? About who we are. ...If tonight you are hearing with your soul, it is time for Metanoia— a new mind about yourself and about life.

Marcel Proust is one of the greatest literary figures of 20^th Century France. In the excerpt below he speaks indirectly of this transformation of mind (among other things) by way of literature. The excerpt is long, but if you take the time to read it you might come away with something that was well worth your time.

"…After this central belief, which moved incessantly during my reading from inside to outside, toward the discovery of the truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in which I was taking part, for those afternoons contained more dramatic events than does, often, an entire lifetime. There were the events taking place in the book I was reading; it is true that the people affected by them were not “real”. But all the feelings we are made to experience by the joy or the misfortune of a real person are produced in us only through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist consisted in understanding that the apparatus of our emotions, the image being the only essential element, the simplification that would consist in purely and simply abolishing real people would be a decisive improvement. A real human being, however profoundly we sympathize with him, is in large part perceived by our senses, that is to say, remains opaque to us, presents a dead weight which our sensibility cannot lift. If a calamity should strike him, it is only in a small part of the total notion we have of him that we will be able to be moved by this; even more, it is only in a part of the total notion he has of himself that he will be able to be moved himself. The novelist’s happy discovery was to have the idea of replacing these parts, impenetrable to the soul, by an equal quantity of immaterial parts, that is to say, parts which our soul can assimilate. What does it matter thenceforth if the actions, and the emotions, of this new order of creatures seem to us true, since we have made them ours, since it is within us that they occur, that they hold within their control, as we feverishly turn the pages of the book, the rapidity of our breathing and the intensity of our gaze. And once the novelist has put us in that state, in which, as in all purely internal states, every emotion is multiplied tenfold, in which his book will disturb us as might a dream but a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer, then see how he provokes in us within one hour all possible happinesses and all possible unhappinesses just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them (thus our heart changes, in life, and it is the worst pain; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality it changes, as certain phenomena of nature occur, slowly enough so that, even if we are able to observe successively each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change."

~Marcel Proust, Du Coté de Chez Swann, A la Recherché du Temps Perdu

(Swann’s Way) (In Search of Lost Time)