“For Jews, reflection and renewal … are elicited through text study. Our most enduring words do not simply remind us of who we once aspired to be; they press us to ask how well we have lived up to them and how they might yet speak with urgency in our own time.”
– Rabbi Leon A. Morris, Talmud of America
Tag: Quotables
Illustrative things said by people other than me. Think of them as pieces of congealed wonder and wisdom.
What It’s All About
“Strangers stopping strangers, just to shake their hand…”
–Robert Hunter
Arms Call
“Don’t spectate: CREATE!”
–Barbatus the Elder
Ageless Speech
SPEAKING OF H.P. LOVECRAFT, as I was in the prior post, it’s easy to dismiss him for what some have called his “overly purple prose.” He can, I admit, become extremely flowery at times, but as mentioned here and elsewhere, the man was a true poet at heart: his writing is evocative, and justly so – its literary power is derived from the consent of the reader to simply and happily wallow in it. By way of illustration, I offer the following sonnet from a collection of same on weird topics titled Fungi from Yuggoth. It speaks to me, and deeply; I hope it does the same for you.
XXXVI. Continuity
There is in certain ancient things a trace
Of some dim essence—more than form or weight;
A tenuous aether, indeterminate,
Yet linked with all the laws of time and space.
A faint, veiled sign of continuities
That outward eyes can never quite descry;
Of locked dimensions harbouring years gone by,
And out of reach except for hidden keys.
It moves me most when slanting sunbeams glow
On old farm buildings set against a hill,
And paint with life the shapes which linger still
From centuries less a dream than this we know.
In that strange light I feel I am not far
From the fixt mass whose sides the ages are.
Who Knows?
“Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s power to bear?”
— H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Forever Here
“Now is never just a moment. The long now is the recognition that the precise moment you’re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future.”
— Brian Eno, cofounder of the Long Now Foundation
No Kidding
There is no word in Hebrew for ‘coincidence.'”
— Rabbi Yitzchak Zweig
Wide Open
“How can we live among so many wonders and not be overwhelmed by the sheer mystery of existence?”
— Robert Anton Wilson
Learning Curve
In youth, one learns to talk; in maturity, one learns to be silent. This is our problem: that we learn to talk before we learn to be silent.”
— Rabbi Nachman of Breslov
Nature’s Forces
Women run the world; we men don’t know what the hell we’re doing. And wisdom comes from accepting this.”
– Me
Mind+Body=?
We are spiritual beings having a physical experience.”
— Teilhard de Chardin
Iconoclastics 101
Any god who is mine but not yours, any god concerned with me but not with you, is an idol.”
– Abraham Joshua Heschel