Potent Quotes Archive
The Approach to Spiritual Practice
We do not do our practices in order to come to realize God, but rather we accept the Unity of God first and then everything follows from that.
--Reshad Feild, The Last Barrier; A Journey Through the World of Sufi Teaching
Dreams and Visions
We have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.
--Carl Jung
Permanent Music
The Indians long ago knew that music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out at a window at a landscape which didn’t stop when one turned away.
--John Cage
Music Improvisation
I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later.
--Miles Davis
The Flute
The flute is totally empty
It is the breath that flows through
...sings and dances...
To be empty is not emptiness
--Rumi
Einstein's Not-God
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own – a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.
--Albert Einstein
One Interpretation of the Meaning of the Cross
“Yes,” he said, “the cross is a good symbol to describe those two aspects of time. The vertical bar of the cross represents the eternal aspect of time, and the horizontal bar the aspect of passing time. Where the two bars cross, it is possible to see both times at once; the flashes of deep understanding that we have come from that point.”
--from The Invisible Way by Reshad Field
Einstein's God
“I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.”
"The Jewish tradition also contains something else, something which finds splendid expression in many of the Psalms, namely, a sort of intoxicated joy and amazement at the beauty and grandeur of this world of which man can form just a faint notion. This joy is the feeling from which true scientific research draws its spiritual sustenance, but which also seems to find expression in the songs of birds."
--Albert Einstein
Any Road
If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.
--George Harrison, based on Alice in Wonderland conversation with the Cheshire Cat
Spirit and Art
Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.
--Leonardo da Vinci
All at Once
We can never overestimate the good that comes from artistic communication.
When we touch one another through music, we are touching
the heart, the mind and the spirit, all at once.
--Leonard Bernstein
The Unifying Web and the Law of Karma
We cannot live only for ourselves.
A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers,
as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.
--Herman Melville
Soul in Action
What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting man, does not,
as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect,
but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action,
would make our knees bend.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Transforming What You Are
If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.
--J. Krishnamurti
Multidimensional Personality
You are a multidimensional personality. Trust the miracle of your own being.
Make no divisions between the physical and the spiritual in your lifetime,
for the spiritual speaks with a physical voice
and the corporeal body is a creation of the spirit.
--Seth, in Jane Roberts’ The Nature of Personal Reality
A Perspective on Fear and Craving
Man is afraid of things that cannot harm him and he knows it, and he craves things that cannot be of help to him, and he knows it, but in truth the one thing man is afraid of is within himself and the one thing he craves is within himself.
--The Tales of Rabbi Nachman, translated by Martin Buber
The Empty Bucket
There is a fountain inside you.
Don’t walk around with an empty bucket.
--Rumi
The Victorious Conjurations of the Spirit
By the beauty of art, by the depth of knowledge.
In them and in them alone are contained
the victorious conjurations of the spirit.
--Nicholas Roerich
The Paradox of Individuality and Universality
Man’s task in life is precisely the paradoxical one of realizing his individuality and at the same time transcending it to arrive at the experience of universality. Only the fully developed individual self can drop the ego.
--Erich Fromm
Art, Grief, Sorrow, Depression, Nourishment
When anyone seriously pursues an art – painting, poetry, sculpture, composing – over twenty or thirty years, the sustained discipline carries the artist down to the countryside of grief; and that descent, resisted so long, proves invigorating…As I’ve gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.
--Robert Bly
Last Words
Love one another.
--George Harrison
What Comes and What Goes
Mysteriously, wonderfully, I bid farewell to what goes.
I greet what comes; for what comes cannot be denied.
And what goes cannot be detained.
--Chuang Tzu
My Next Great Adventure
My next great adventure, aged 90, is going to be dying.
There’s either nothing or something.
If there’s nothing, there’s nothing, that’s it.
If there’s something, I can’t think of a greater adventure than finding out what it is.
I happen to think there is something because of the experiences I’ve had,
because of experiences other people have had.
Very powerful ones.
--Jane Goodall
Cozying Up to Mystery
If you don't cozy up to mystery, you're missing life.
--Ram Dass
Juxtaposed Quotes #2
Spirit is something that no one destroys.
---From The Low Spark of High-heeled Boys, by Jim Capaldi and Steve Winwood
The Invincible
--Title to a book by Nicholas Roerich
How would you define the word, "beat?"
Steve Allen:
How would you define the word, “beat?”
Jack Kerouac:
“Sympathetic.”