Mystic Quotes - Page 6

• In wishing to know ourselves fully, we must forget our quest for gain and seek only completion. At a certain point in our development, we no longer even seek to become Mystic, Magister, Sorcerer, or Witch: we seek only our own perfection in the wholeness of our Will, in the joining of light with dark and strength with love. We are varied and gorgeous yet pure of heart. Our aim is this: to know ourselves and to know the world.

  T. Thorn Coyle

  Heart, Dark, Light

  T. Thorn Coyle (2009). “Kissing the Limitless: Deep Magic and the Great Work of Transforming Yourself and the World”, p.16, Weiser Books

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• A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.

  Umberto Eco

  Doctors, Mets

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• The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.

  William James

  Opinion, Consciousness, Whole

  William James (2013). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.387, Courier Corporation

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• We could decide simply to remain absorbed in the mysterious, unformed, free-play of reality. This would be the choice of the mystic who seeks to extinguish himself in God or Nirvana—analogous perhaps to the tendency among artists to obliterate themselves with alcohol or opiates. But if we value our participation in a shared reality in which it makes sense to make sense, then such self-abnegation would deny a central element of our humanity: the need to speak and act, to share our experience with others.

  Stephen Batchelor

  Artist, Reality, Self

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• The laws keep up their credit, not by being just, but because they are laws; 'tis the mystic foundation of their authority; they have no other, and it well answers their purpose. They are often made by fools; still oftener by men who, out of hatred to equality, fail in equity; but always by men, vain and irresolute authors.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Men, Law, Hatred

  Michel de Montaigne (1877). “The Essays of Montaigne”, p.386

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• Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.

  Carl Sandburg

  Sunset, Fire, Purple

  Carl Sandburg (2003). “The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg”, p.319, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Magic birds were dancing in the mystic marsh. The grass swayed with them, and the shallow waters, and the earth fluttered under them. The earth was dancing with the cranes, and the low sun, and the wind and sky.

  Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

  Wind, Sky, Dancing

  Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1985). “The Yearling”, p.88, Simon and Schuster

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• Mysticism is a rational enterprise. Religion is not. The mystic has recognized something about the nature of consciousness prior to thought, and this recognition is susceptible to rational discussion. The mystic has reasons for what he believes, and these reasons are empirical. The roiling mystery of the world can be analyzed with concepts (this is science), or it can be experienced free of concepts (this is myticism). Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial-at once full of hope and full of fear-of the vastitude of human ignorance.

  Sam Harris

  Believe, Ignorance, World

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• I did not feel drawn to huxley. He was beautiful physically but again without vibrations or sensory antennae... and I had a painful impression of a psychic blindness. With all his science and knowledge, in the mystic world he blundered.

  Anais Nin

  Beautiful, Psychics, World

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• The most interesting to me were Doctor Strange, because he was so mystic, and Thor, because that was really cool. I mean, I had never been able to relate to the idea of a bearded guy in the sky, you know, and I'd always really liked mythology, and with Thor, it was like Stan Lee was actually saying, "Yeah, it's okay, there really is this Nordic god, there really is something besides the bearded guy in the sky". So I loved that!

  Trina Robbins

  Mean, Doctors, Sky

  Source: comicsbulletin.com

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• The primitive Christians perpetually trod on mystic ground, and their minds were exercised by the habits of believing the most extraordinary events

  Edward Gibbon

  Christian, Believe, Mind

  Edward Gibbon (1998). “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.264, Wordsworth Editions

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• Mysticism, according to its historical and psychological definitions, is the direct intuition or experience of God; and a mystic is a person who has, to a greater or less degree, such a direct experience -- one whose religion and life are centered, not merely on an accepted belief or practice, but on that which the person regards as first hand personal knowledge.

  Evelyn Underhill

  Personal Knowledge, Hands, Practice

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• Dark the Night, with breath all flowers,
  And tender broken voice that fills
  With ravishment the listening hours,--
  Whisperings, wooings,
  Liquid ripples, and soft ring-dove cooings
  In low-toned rhythm that love's aching stills!
  Dark the night
  Yet is she bright,
  For in her dark she brings the mystic star,
  Trembling yet strong, as is the voice of love,
  From some unknown afar.

  George Eliot

  Strong, Stars, Flower

  George Eliot (19??). “The Complete Works of George Eliot in Eighteen Volumes: Poems”

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• I wanted to go higher than Rockefeller Center, which was being erected across the street from Saks Fifth Avenue and was going to cut off my view of the sky. . . . Flying got into my soul instantly but the answer as to why must be found somewhere back in the mystic maze of my birth and childhood and the circumstances of my earlier life. Whatever I am is elemental and the beginnings of it all have their roots in Sawdust Road. I might have been born in a hovel, but I determined to travel with the wind and stars.

  Jacqueline Cochran

  Stars, Cutting, Views

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• The difference between Pound and Whitman is not between the democrat who in deep distress could look hopefully toward the future and the fascist madly in love with the past. It is that between the woodsman and the woodcarver. It is that between the mystic harking back to his vision and the artist whose first allegiance is to his craft, and so to the reality it presents.

  Babette Deutsch

  Artist, Past, Reality

  Babette Deutsch (1963). “Poetry in our time: a critical survey of poetry in the English-speaking world, 1900 to 1960”, Columbia University Press

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• After an interval of two and a half centuries, the tradition of mystic illumination renewed itself in Italy and Germany.

  James Mark Baldwin

  Illumination, Two, Germany

  James Mark Baldwin (1913). “From the earliest times to John Locke.- v. 2. From John Locke to the present time”

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• Oscar nominations came out today. Up for best actor, Sean Penn for 'Mystic River,' Jude Law for 'Cold Mountain,' and of course, George W. Bush for 'Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction.'

  Jay Leno

  Mass Destruction, Law, Rivers

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• Democracy and equality try to denythe mystic recognition of difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred responsibility of authority.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Leadership, Responsibility, Equality

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• And evermore the waters worship God;--
  And bards and prophets tune their mystic lyres
  While listening to the music of the waves!

  Sarah Josepha Hale

  Ocean, Water, Listening

  Sarah Josepha Hale (1850). “Dictionary of poetical quotations”, p.388

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• This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of this entire existence, but in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear; tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as "I am in the east and the west, I am above and below, I am this entire world."

  Erwin Schrodinger

  Wise, Simple, Men

  "My View of the World". Book by Erwin Schrodinger, 1961.

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• I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straitening shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.

  John Steinbeck

  Prayer, Writing, Color

  John Steinbeck (1990). “Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters”, p.12, Penguin

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• The question that faces every man born into this world is not what should be his purpose, which he should set about to achieve, but just what to do with life? The answer, that he should order his life so that he can find the greatest happiness in it, is more a practical question, similar to that of how a man should spend his weekend, then a metaphysical proposition as to what is the mystic purpose of his life in the scheme of the universe.

  Lin Yutang

  Men, Weekend, Order

  Lin Yutang (2013). “Lin Yutang - The Importance Of Living”, p.71, Read Books Ltd

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• Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoievsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Artist, Two, Realizing

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• Many people have thought of me as a thinker, as a philosopher, or even as a mystic. Well the truth is that though I have found reality perplexing enough - in fact, I find it gets more perplexing all the time - I never think of myself as a thinker.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Reality, Thinking, People

  Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Burgin (1998). “Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations”, p.79, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• I contend that the time has come to develop what I call "integrated spiritual masters." These are individuals that have a full-on experience of all levels of life spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, and yes... physically. In other words they can soar into the realms of the mystic and yet still keep their feet in the sand.

  James Arthur Ray

  Spiritual, Feet, Levels

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