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What does mysticism
really mean? It means the way to attain knowledge. It's
close to philosophy, except in philosophy you go horizontally
while in mysticism you go vertically.
Elie Wiesel (b. 1928), Rumanian-born U.S. writer.
Interview in Writers at Work
(Eighth Series, ed. by George Plimpton, 1988).
Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy.
The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what
can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.
Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), U.S. journalist. A Preface to
Morals, ch. 15 (1929).
There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to "realize"
myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have
"succeeded," this is nothing but humbug and mystification.
Everything we dream is "realizable." Reality does not
have to be: it is simply what it is.
Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912), Rumanian-born French playwright.
"Experience of the Theatre," in Nouvelle N.R.F, no.
62 (Paris, 1958; repr. in Notes and Counter Notes, 1962).
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost (1874-1963), U.S. poet. The Road Not Taken,
st. 4.
How have I been able to live so long outside Nature without
identifying myself with it? Everything lives, moves, everything
corresponds; the magnetic rays, emanating either from myself or
from others, cross the limitless chain of created things unimpeded;
it is a transparent network that covers the world, and its slender
threads communicate themselves by degrees to the planets and stars.
Captive now upon earth, I commune with the chorus of the stars
who share in my joys and sorrows.
Gérard de Nerval (1808-55), French novelist, poet. Aurélia,
pt. 2, ch. 6 (1855; repr. in Selected Writings, ed. and tr. by
Geoffrey Wagner, 1958).
All things by immortal power,
Near and Far
Hiddenly
To each other linked are,
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star.
Francis Thompson (1859-1907), English poet. The Mistress of Vision.
In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Israeli statesman. CBS-TV, 5 Oct.
1956.
It isn't safe to sit in judgment upon another person's illusion
when you are not on the inside. While you are thinking it is a
dream, he may be knowing it is a planet.
Mark Twain (1835-1910), U.S. author. "Three Thousand Years
Among the Microbes," ch. 13 (written 1905; published in Which
Was the Dream?, ed. by John S. Tuckey, 1967).
It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without
physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an
atom's way of knowing about atoms.
George Wald (b. 1906), U.S. biochemist. Foreword to L. J. Henderson,
The Fitness of the Environment (1959).
Only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the
unknown, that terror becomes the known.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), French aviator and
author. Wind, Sand, and Stars (published in Terre des Hommes,
ch. 2, sct. 2, 1939).
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