PHILOSOPHICAL QUOTES

Rainer Maria Rilke greeted and wrestled with the angels of his Duino Elegies in the solitude of a castle surrounded by white cliffs tall trees and the sea. I greeted most of mine in the solitude of a house that still vibrated with the throbs of a singular life that had helped shape many lives and with the ache of attempts to render useful service to that life. The River of Winged Dreams was therefore constructed as a link between dimensions of past and future emotions and intellect and matter and spirit.

Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.—Why then do you try to "enlarge" your mind? Subtilize it

[On Jason Mashak's book SALTY AS A LIP, as reviewed in The Prague Post:] Mashak amalgamates various national, historical and religious traditions into a myth-mash that illuminates many sects' fanatical compartmentalizing, and the fact that so many religions and philosophies share similar goals, if not roots.

Sorry, moth,' he said. 'I'm afraid I've rather spoiled your night out. Presumably I've made some other moth a widow, or a widower—I've no idea what sex you are... were, I mean. But I didn't do you in with malice aforethought, old moth, take my word for it. I have no grudge against you, old moth, I do assure you. On the contrary, what I feel for you is love, the love of a tender morsel of moth-meat. I am a great lover of tender morsels, of vole-meat and mouse-meat, of the flesh of little birds and the innards of beetles, and of bite-sized bits of the wriggling worm. All must die to keep Eustace in good nick. And lastly I console you, my lepidopterous friend, with the thought that some day or night Eustace will drop off his perch and be loved in his turn, by the ants and the maggots.

Love is born into eve­ry human being: it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.
...
[W]e used to be complete wholes in our original nature, and now ‘love’ is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.

A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he don't want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It ain't the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything.