Universality Quotes (page 20)
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand,...
Aldous Huxley
Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung...
A. Whitney Brown
What we see, we seeand seeing is changingthe light that shrivels a mountainand leaves a man alive. Heartbeat of the pulsarheart sweating through my body. The radio impulsepouring in from Taurus I am bombarded yet I stand. I have been standing all my life in thedirect path of a battery of signalsthe most accurately transmitted mostuntranslatable language of the universe. I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-luted that a light wave could take 15years to travel through me And...
Adrienne Rich
The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak...
Annie Dillard
The Christian admits that the universe is manifold and even miscellaneous, just as a sane man knows that he is complex. The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane. The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just...
Gilbert K. Chesterton
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world of things entered your infant mind. To populate that crystal cabinet. Within its walls the strangest partners met, And things turned thoughts did propagate their kind. For, once within, corporeal fact could find. A spirit. Fact and you in mutual debt. Built there your little microcosm - which yet. Had hugest tasks to its small self assigned. Dead men can live there, and converse with stars: Equator speaks with pole, and night with day; Spirit dissolves the world's material bars -A...
Julian Huxley