Building Wisdom, Bit By Bit

“No doubt is there about this Book: It is a guidance unto the God-fearing.” — Qur’an 2:1

“I offer to Thee the only thing I have:
My capacity of being filled with Thee.” — Sufi Prayer

“I’m happy even before I have a reason
I’m full of Light even before the sky
Can greet the sun or the moon.
Dear companions, we have been in love with God
For so very, very long.
What can we now do but forever
Dance!” — Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī

“He who would know the secret of both worlds
Will find that the secret of them both is Love.” — Abū Ḥamīd bin Abū Bakr Ibrāhīm, hereafter called Farīd ud-Dīn ʿAṭṭār

“If you could get rid
of yourself just once
the secret of secrets
would open to you.
The face of the unknown,
hidden beyond the universe
would appear on the
mirror of your perception.” — Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

“I am nearer to you than yourself.
Than your soul, than your breath.” — Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibnʿArabī al-Ḥātimī aṭ-Ṭāʾī hereafter called Ibn ʿArabī

“Come, join the honest company of the King’s beggars -
Those gamblers, scoundrels and divine clowns and those astonishing fair courtesans
Who need Divine Love every night.
Come, join the courageous who have no choice but to bet their entire world
That indeed, indeed, God is real.” — Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī

“For ever we come, for ever we go;
[…]
But sure, a mystery here abides,
A Something is there for us to know.” — Lalla-Ded

“You are that reflected eye and He is the light of that Seeing. The eyes of the Real see with the eye of the Seer.
The cosmos becomes the man, the man the cosmos - there is no clearer explanation than this!” — Shaykh Sa’d ud-Dīn Mahmūd Shabistārī

“When you really look for me, you will see me instantly —
you will find me in the tiniest house of time.” — Kabîr

“Let us go hand in hand.
Let us enter the presence of Truth.” — Ibn ʿArabī

“Nothing could enter it but the sincere act.” — Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Jabbar ibn al-Hasan al-Niffarī

“So beautiful appeared my death – knowing who then I would kiss,
I died a thousand times before I died.
‘Die before you die,’ said the Prophet
Muhammad.
Have wings that feared ever
touched the Sun?
I was born when all I once
feared – I could
love.” – Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya al-Qaysiyya hereafter called Rābiʿa Basri

“Naught is, save God: and all that is, is God.” — Farīd ud-Dīn ʿAṭṭār

“Love’s conqueror is he whom love conquers” — Hakim Abul-Majd Majdūd ibn Ādam Sanā’ī Ghaznavi

“This identity out of the One into the One and with the One is the source and fountainhead and breaking forth of glowing Love.” — Meister Eckhart

“The real basis of their poetry is a loftily inculcated ethical system, which recognises in purity of heart, charity, self-renunciation, and bridling of the passions, the necessary conditions of eternal happiness.” — Reynold Nicholson

“Each person is a carbon copy of the lawḥ maḥfuẓ (guarded tablet). Each of us carries the same copy of consciousness. The copy of Qur’an is in the heart, but we must make an effort to read it. That reading means living it, and that living it is actually unifying the inward and outward.” — Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri

“This is that mystic religion which, though it has nothing in it but that same spirit, that same truth, and that same life, which always was and always must be the religion of all God’s holy angels and saints in heaven, is by the wisdom of this world accounted to be madness.” — William Law

The words of the poets are not abstract but specific, not idea but thing […] The poet, like an applied scientist, sticks to data and tries, with the poverty and spice of language, to recreate that experience of observation” — Willis Barnstone

“I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.” — T. S. Eliot

“And indeed this, your religion, is one religion, and I am your Lord, so fear Me.” — Qur’an 23:52

“Know thou that fear and hope are one.” — Hakim Abul-Majd Majdūd ibn Ādam Sanā’ī Ghaznavi

“And indeed, you invite them to a straight path.” — Qur’an 23:73

“Your sickness is from you - but you do not perceive it.
Your remedy is within you - but you do not sense it.
You presume you are a small entity - whereas within you is enfolded the entire universe.
You are indeed the evident book, by whose alphabet the hidden becomes manifest.
Therefore you have no need to look beyond yourself; what you seek is within you, if only you reflect.” — Imam Ali Ibn Abi Talib

“What greater realisation can there be than that there is no way out of love?” — Dr John Demartini

“The flute of the Infinite
is played without ceasing,
and its sound is love” — Kabîr

“No, it is not possible
to throw away this love.” — Mirabai

“Let your worship song be silence” — Lalla-Ded

“You are waiting for me to describe what this silence is so that you can compare it, interpret it, carry it away and bury it. It cannot be described. What can be described is the known and freedom from the known can come into being only when there is a dying every day to the known, to the hurts, the flatteries, to all the images you have made, to all your experiences […] That silence which is not the silence of the ending of noise is only a small beginning. It is like going through a small hole to an enormous, wide, expansive ocean, to an immeasurable, timeless state.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Without a place and with a place
to rest — living darkly with no ray
of light — I burn myself away” — St John of the Cross

“Isn’t that a sort of parallel of the process that every human being has to go through in his inner life in order to first achieve the affirmation of what one is, then have the courage to let that identity go in order to find the way back. I think this is what music is about.” — Daniel Barenboim

“The while amazed between
His Beauty and His Majesty
I stood in silent ecstasy” — Rābiʿa Basri

“Be content with what you have;
rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you” — Lao Tzu

“This is a great and precious gift; but if the poet remains content with his gift, if he persists in worshipping the beauty in nature without going on to make himself capable, through selflessness, of apprehending Beauty as it is in the divine Ground, then he is only an idolater.” — Aldous Huxley

“Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
but dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” — Robert Frost

“But there’s a tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have look’d upon
[…]
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” — William Wordsworth

“To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. I told you that.” — Salman Rushdie

“In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid Cities.” — Arthur Rimbaud

“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant — there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing — and keeping the unknown always beyond you.” — Georgia O’Keefe

“We are not particularly interested in spreading the teachings, but we are interested in making use of them and putting them into effect.” — Chögyam Trungpa

“The Sea
Will be the Sea
Whatever the drop’s philosophy.” — Farīd ud-Dīn ʿAṭṭār

“When I reached Him I saw that His remembering of me preceded my remembrance of Him.” — Bâyezîd Bistamî

“Know that when you learn to lose yourself, you will reach the Beloved. There is no other lesson to be learnt, and more than this is not known by me.” — Sheikh Abdullah Ansari of Herat

“Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.” — T. S. Eliot

“So that one day you realised that what you wanted
had already happened long ago and in the dwelling place
you had lived in before you began,
and that every step along the way, you had carried
the heart and the mind and the promise
that first set you off and drew you on and that you were
more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way
than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach” — David Whyte

“It’s time
with all your colours and eternities
to free me.” — Mirabai

“We need the awkward truth of poetry. We need its indirect insistence on the magic of listening.
[…]
We need the voice that speaks to our joys, our childhoods, and to the Gordian knots of our private and national condition. A voice that speaks to our doubts, our fears, and to all the unsuspected dimensions that make us both human and beings touched by the whispering of the stars.” — Ben Okri

“For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?” —T. S. Eliot

“Only art penetrates […] the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints which, without art, we can’t receive.” — Saul Bellow

“One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience… Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

“The most important thing is to explain to people what sound does […] Why is it that there is an emotive quality to sound? In other words, how to listen: how to attach yourself to the first sound in the hope of staying with it until the end.” — Daniel Barenboim

“I had been drawn into these tones which in their apparent monotony recalled the eternal recurrence of all things existing and knocked at the doors of your own feelings and called forth, step by step, all that had been moving in you without your knowledge . . . laid bare something that had always been there and now became obvious to you with a vividness that made your heart pound […] a rushing of wheels out of eternity into eternity, without measure or limit or goal, a breathless, reckless tightrope-walker’s run over knife-edge precipices, through one eternal present, towards an awareness that was freedom, and power, and beyond all thought. And, suddenly, in the midst of an uprising sweep: a stop and a deadly silence. Brutal. Honest. Clean.” — Muhammad Asad

“Had I known how listening is superior to speaking, I would not have wasted my life preaching.” — Farīd ud-Dīn ʿAṭṭār

“From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death — all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence.” — Aldous Huxley

“It has come to me of late that comparing one man’s work to another’s, naming one greater or lesser, is a wrong approach. The important and only vital question is, how much greater, finer, am I than I was yesterday? Have I fulfilled my possibilities, made the most of my potentialities? What a marvellous world if all would, — could hold this attitude toward life.” — Edward Weston

“If your heart is pure, all things in the world are pure
Abandon this fleeting world, abandon yourself
Then the moon and the flowers
Will guide you along the Way” — Ryokan

“I didn’t want to compromise the anthemic, hymn-like quality. I didn’t want it to get too punchy. I didn’t want to start a fight in the song. I wanted a revelation in the heart rather than a confrontation or a call-to-arms or a defense.” — Leonard Cohen

“Verily in the remembrance of Allah do hearts find rest and satisfaction!” — Qur’an 13:28

“Those awake have a common world.
Those sleeping drop into a private realm.” — Heraclitus

“Sometimes he went to her house, and then they liked to sit on the sea terrace, drenched by salt spray, watching the dawn of the whole world on the horizon.” — Gabriel García Márquez

“In the chamber of emptiness a light shines and joy is here to stay.” — Chuang Tzu

“The morn of blessedness hath dawned. Morn? No, tis
the light of God.” — Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

“Keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From your prayers and work and music
And from your companions’ beautiful laughter.

Keep squeezing drops of the Sun
From the sacred hands and glance of your Beloved
And, my dear,
From the most insignificant movements
Of your own holy body.” — Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume
For every atom belonging to me
As good belongs to you.” — Walt Whitman

“The bow’s name is life,
but its work is death” — Heraclitus

“There was a Door to which I found no Key:
There was a Veil through which I could not see:
Some little Talk awhile of Me and Thee
There seemed — and then no more of Thee and Me.” — Omar Khayyam

“We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.” — T. S. Eliot

“Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us” — Virginia Woolf

“What of the traceless can the tongueless tell?
Lovers are killed by those they love so well;
No voices from the slain return.”” — Abū-Muhammad Muslih al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, hereafter called Sa’adi

“So, my friends, before the lid of this coffin is taken off,
Do all you can to become a bird of the Way to God;
Do all you can to develop your wings and your feathers.” — Farīd ud-Dīn ʿAṭṭār

“A Moment’s Halt–a momentary taste
Of Being from the Well amid the Waste–
And Lo!–the phantom Caravan has reach’d
The Nothing it set out from–Oh, make haste!” — Omar Khayyam

“Die into your nothingness and you will live by the light of the eternal soul.” — Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri

“0 joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That Nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!” — William Wordsworth

“There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song — but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.” — Pablo Neruda

“The desert is bare and clean and knows no compromise. It sweeps out of the heart of man all the lovely fantasies that could be used as a masquerade for wishful thinking, and thus makes him free to surrender himself to an Absolute that has no image: the farthest of all that is far and yet the nearest of all that is near.” — Muhammad Asad

“One thing only is needful: the knowledge of the simple and clear truth which finds place in every soul that is not stupefied by religious and scientific superstitions — the truth that for our life one law is valid — the law of love, which brings the highest happiness to every individual as well as to all mankind. Free your minds from those overgrown, mountainous imbecilities which hinder your recognition of it, and at once the truth will emerge from amid the pseudo-religious nonsense that has been smothering it: the indubitable, eternal truth inherent in man, which is one and the same in all the great religions of the world.” — Leo Tolstoy to Mahatma Ghandi

“All a sane man can ever care about is giving Love!” — Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī

“For hate is never conquered by hate.
Hate is conquered by love.
This is an eternal law.” — Buddha

“You see, you are not so soft after all; you are rock and wave and the peeling bark of trees, you are ladybirds and the smell of a garden after the rain. When you put your best foot forward, you are taking the north side of a mountain with you.” — Ella Frances Sanders

“There are a people, now forgotten, who discovered while others were yet barbarians, the elements of the arts and sciences. A race of men, now rejected from society for their sable skin and frizzled hair, founded on the study of the laws of nature, those civil and religious systems which still govern the universe.” — Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney

“The future can be changed. We are all brothers and sisters, the children of one father and one mother. Treat children and animals with kindness, and pass this wisdom on to generations to come and I assure you there will come a time when our grandchildren, or our great grandchildren, will live in a world of beauty and harmony. And they will hear a far-off music, a beautiful, cosmic music, that will lift them beyond all fear, suffering and limitation, into a universal brotherhood, beyond this little world and its fearful dreams. That music is the Song of the Stars. Indaba.” — Baba Credo Mutwa

“I was the one who listened, still listened.
I could sit there and hear it come very close:
the star-sound Tsau, sounding Tsau! Tsau!” — /Han≠kasso

“After me, nothing. And in that nothing, something is born from brave new souls, something like paradise, drifting in from the horizon.” — Ben Okri

“Living in a place that may capsize at any moment is not a problem, it is a gift. South is South. A spiritual backwater? Wonderful! Remote outpost? Brilliant! It is right here that we find our centre, right here that teachers appear, in these beautiful and bitter circumstances. And an unbroken transmission of the light is already passing from heart to heart all the way to Cape Town.” — Anthony Osler

“And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love,
And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.” — William Blake

“Everything else can wait, but the search for God cannot wait, and love one another.” — George Harrison’s final public statement

“Rely not, nor repose on this world’s gain,
For many a son like thee she has reared and slain.
What matters, when the spirit seeks to fly,
If on a throne or on bare earth we die?” — Sa’adi

“Don’t be dead or asleep or awake.
Don’t be anything.
What you most want,
what you travel around wishing to find,
lose yourself as lovers lose themselves,
and you’ll be that.” — Farīd ud-Dīn ʿAṭṭār

“Longing is a living prayer of love […] In the ocean of love’s longing, the ego is doomed. The primal cry of the soul takes the lover beyond this world and the next, straight to Him who is our deepest desire […] The secret of love’s union is the He unites with Himself in the heart of His lover. The lover who gives himself to longing participates in this mystery […] Love is both the longing for union and the bliss of union. Love is the sadness of separation and the knowledge that there is no separation.” — Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

“I was passionate,
filled with longing,
I searched
far and wide.

But the day
that the Truthful One
found me,
I was at home.” — Lalla-Ded

“Say: All is from Allah…” — Qur’an 4:78

“Was it not I that summoned thee to My service?
Did I not make thee busy with my name?
Thy calling ‘Allah!’ was My ‘Here I am.’” — Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

“A flash illumined all my soul;
The heart of my heart opened wide.
O joy, O bliss, what do I find!
My love, my love you are here
And you are here, my love, my all!” — Swami Vivekananda

“Love does not belong to time, but to the eternal moment of the soul. Each time we repeat His name it is for the first time. Each moment is an opportunity to say the name of our Beloved.” — Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

“Love has come and it flows like blood beneath my skin, through my veins.
It has emptied me of myself and filled me with the Beloved.
The Beloved has penetrated every cell of my body.
Of myself there remains only a name, everything else is Him.” — — Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

“I want union with Him and He wants separation;
thus I leave what I want so His wish comes true.” — al-Ghazzâlî

“We have not come here to take prisoners,
But to surrender ever more deeply
To freedom and joy.” — Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī

“When you get, on the one hand, a sense of awe, which is passive, and, on the other, the courage to do, which is active, you get this fantastic intensity.” — Daniel Barenboim

“Passionate intensity,
It’s a complicated fusion.
We are catapulted towards death.
The mystique I adore is the beating heart of those who share my life.
This is their legacy, in obscene glances, laced in silver.
I like writing; I do this to amuse myself.
It’s my life, and I only get one go around, this was the result.
Like life, it’s tentative, fragile, and halting,
and these are the memories gorgeous,
and welcome home.” — Jeff Newell

“All I can do is tell you
by putting my own hunger on the page.” — Mary Oliver

“But who can see and savor
What’s on display inside […]
Who can hear the holy bells
That peal without a sound” — Joseph Lamport

“Waving its row of lamps, the universe sings in worship day and night,
There are the hidden banner and the secret canopy:
There the sound of the unseen bells is heard.
Kabîr says: “There adoration never ceases; there the Lord of the Universe sitteth on His throne.”” — Kabîr

“For a human being,
character is godly.” — Heraclitus

“So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark,
and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.” — Jane Hirschfield

“He has raised up the heavens. He has set the balance” — Qur’an 55:7

“We are God’s, and to Him shall we return.” — Baha’u’llah

“Those drunk with God, tho’ they be thousands, are yet one” — Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

“He has a special tenderness for His own, personal idiots.” — Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

“To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.” — T. S. Eliot

“Here there is no radiator, only radiation. And when only this radiation exists, without a radiator, it could go on and on and on, and the energy would never be used up. It is always transformed and as it expands further and further it changes always into something else, into a new creative activity.” — Chögyam Trungpa

“Not until you start asking a question, do you get something. The situation cannot declare itself until you’ve asked your question.” — John Wheeler

“He nonetheless bravely offers us a lovely, chilling paradox: At the heart of everything is a question, not an answer. When we peer down into the deepest recesses of matter or at the farthest edge of the universe, we see, finally, our own puzzled face looking back at us.” — John Horgan

“And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”” — T. S. Eliot

“What was that mass of waters? Nought but the waves.
What was that wave? Nought but the sea.” — Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

“See the world as yourself
Have faith in the way things are
Love the world as yourself
Then you can care for all things.” — Tao Te Ching XIII

“When my mind was cleansed of impurities,
like a mirror of its dust and dirt,
I recognized the Self in me:
When I saw Him dwelling in me,
I realized that He was the Everything
and I was nothing.” — Lalla-Ded

“A mirror remains that can’t be broken
because it faces nothing,
because its inside everything.
[…]
Perhaps at certain heights
questions and answers are exactly the same.” — Roberto Juarroz

“The ancient alchemist’s art was to transmute the base lead of the self into the golden soul through practical spiritual disciplines, thereby spiritualising matter and materialising spirit - the perfect blending of lights.” — Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri

“Vos estis tam sancti sicut vultis“ — Ruysbroeck

omnis mundi creatura
quasi liber et pictura
nobis est in speculum
nostrae vitae, nostrae mortis,
nostri status, nostrae sortis
fidele signaculum.“ — Alain de Lile

“All things are but masks at God’s beck and call,
They are symbols that instruct us that God is all.” — Farīd ud-Dīn ʿAṭṭār

“‘My good Adso,’ my master said, ‘during our whole journey I have been teaching you to recognize the evidence through which the world speaks to us like a great book.” — Umberto Eco

“A Hair perhaps divides the False and True;
Yes; and a single Alif were the clue–
Could you but find it–to the Treasure-house,
And peradventure to The Master too;
Whose secret Presence, through Creation’s veins
Running Quicksilver-like eludes your pains;
Taking all shapes from Mah to Mahi; and
They change and perish all–but He remains;
A moment guess’d–then back behind the Fold
Immerst of Darkness round the Drama roll’d
Which, for the Pastime of Eternity,
He doth Himself contrive, enact, behold.” — Omar Khayyam

“Once I said, “God, I thought You knew everything. Why are You asking me where
Your lovers live?”
And the Beloved replied, “Indeed, Hafiz, I do know everything.
But it is fun playing dumb once in a while. And I love intimate chat
And the warmth of your heart’s fire.” — Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī

“It is this sort of optimism that animates the book — optimism that feels not human but geologic, more kindred to the optimism of a tree, rooted in deep time, in strata of cultures and civilizations who all lived and died, hoped and despaired, foraged for meaning, dwelt in dreams; the optimism of uncertainty, the kind Václav Havel recognized as the willingness “to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”” — Maria Popova

“We should resist inertial thinking; indeed, we should urge its opposite – deep time as a radical perspective, provoking us to action not apathy. For to think in deep time can be a means not of escaping our troubled present, but rather of re-imagining it; countermanding its quick greeds and furies with older, slower stories of making and unmaking. At its best, a deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come, bringing us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us.” — Robert Macfarlane

“This is the starting point to perfecting the relationship between action and knowledge. The soul only sees perfection at all times. The self tries to unfold perfection through action. With spiritual wisdom, the self will witness perfection through the soul’s lens. At the end, as in the beginning, there is only the ever perfect divine cosmic soul, the source of all knowledge and action and the creation’s desire for ever-lasting perfection. God is beyond it all and yet all is covered by his essence.” — Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri

“Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving
[…]
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.” — T. S. Eliot

“You say you’ve unrolled the carpet of time,
step then beyond life itself and reason,
till you arrive at God’s command.” — Hakim Abul-Majd Majdūd ibn Ādam Sanā’ī Ghaznavi

“Only god doesn’t pain me today.
Is it because today doesn’t exist?” — Roberto Juarroz

“The Outer and the Inner, the I and the World, are to him not opposite - and mutually opposed - entities, but only different aspects of an unchanging present; his life is not dominated by secret fears; and whenever he does things, he does them because outward necessity and not a desire for inner security demands action. In result, he has not progressed in material achievement as rapidly as the Westerner - but he has kept his soul together.” — Muhammad Asad

“Then there is no achieving, no ladder to climb; there is only the first step and the first step is the everlasting step.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti

“So, instead of trying to pull ourselves up by our bootlaces, let’s take off our shoes altogether, feel the earth beneath our feet and the sun in our hair. Then, when we step forward with helping hands, we will leave no trace.” — Anthony Osler

“The melody of love swells forth, and the rhythm of love’s detachment beats the time.” — Kabîr

“Eternal life is the time of union,
Because time, for me, hath no place there.
Life is the vessels, union the clear draught in them.” — Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

“There love and detachment, bondage and freedom, joy and pain play by turns upon the soul; and it is from their conflict that the Unstruck Music of the Infinite proceeds.” — Kabîr

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention. And awareness. And discipline. And being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad, petty little unsexy ways, every day.” — David Foster Wallace

“Freedom from need is a great form of material wealth. Freedom from want is a great form of spiritual wealth. Where they intersect is for each of us the cross we choose to bear.” — Joseph Lamport

“Mara never crosses the path of those who are virtuous,
who live without thoughtlessness,
and who are liberated by true knowledge.” — Buddha

“And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press
End in what All begins and ends in–Yes;
Think then you are To-day what Yesterday
You were–To-morrow You shall not be less.” — Omar Khayyam

“Wonder is the heaviest element in the periodic table of the heart. Even a tiny piece of it can stop time.” — Diane Ackerman

“Wonder,
A garden among the flames!
My heart can take on any form:
A meadow for gazelles,
A cloister for monks,
For the idols, sacred ground,
Ka’ba for the circling pilgrim,
The tables of the Torah,
The scrolls of the Qur’an.
My creed is Love;
Wherever its caravan turns along the way,
That is my belief,
My faith.” — Ibn ʿArabī

“Every transient reality depends upon the constant truth. Every shadow depends upon light […] The determined seeker keeps only one appointment: timeless bliss.” — Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri

“The devout seeker is he who mingles in his heart the double currents of love and detachment” — Kabîr

“To bring together the extreme gravity of the question with the extreme lightness of the form — that has always been my ambition.” — Milan Kundera

“We are, at birth, born into a condition of poetry. Birth is a poetic condition: it is spirit becoming flesh. Death is also a poetic condition: it is flesh becoming spirit again. It is the miracle of a circle completed, the unheard melody of a life returning to unmeasured silence.
Between birth and death what are our daily moments but a double condition that is primarily poetic: the odd conjunction between inner and outer, between that inner sense of timelessness and the outer evidence of transience?” — Ben Okri

“Now like a radiant sky creature
God keeps opening.

God keeps opening
Inside of Me.” — Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī

“I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of that After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return’d to me,
And answer’d “I Myself am Heav’n and Hell:”
Heav’n but the Vision of fulfill’d Desire,
And Hell the Shadow from a Soul on fire,
Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves,
So late emerged from, shall so soon expire.” — Omar Khayyam

“Of course I wake up finally
thinking, how wonderful to be who I am,
made out of earth and water,
my own thoughts, my own fingerprints -
all that glorious, temporary stuff.” — Mary Oliver

“We shall show them Our wonders on all horizons and in their selves, until it becomes obvious to them that it is the Truth. Does it not suffice that your Lord is a witness of all things?” — Qur’an 41:53

“From man’s perspective in this intricate game of love,
It is so easy to become confused and think you are the doer.
But from God’s infinite certainty,
He always Knows that He is the only one
Who should ever be put on trial.” — Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī

“For him the world is non-existent, and he will not study the unreal; like the compass he circles ever round a point, on which his thoughts, actions, and very being depend: he cannot stray from his course any more than a star can leave its orbit. Hence all mystical writings are the record of one spiritual experience and are pervaded by a single overpowering emotion. The language of all mystics is the same. How often do Law, Emerson, and Shelley remind us of the Masnavi!” — Reynold Nicholson

“A conjuror came visitng with rabbits up his sleeve
A yogi put us on the mat and showed us how to breathe
Franciscan monks walked up and down in robes with knotted cords
We had no doubt they ambled in the footsteps of their Lord
There were Rabbis in the long drop and Sufis in the tree house
Who told us they would give their lives to liberate and free us
Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his friend the Dalai Lama
Came to wash our dishes and check up on our karma
We live so far they said that is was difficult to find us
But they teased each other, laughed at us and laid a trail of kindness” — Anthony Osler

“I was snow and melted away, so that the earth drank me up,
Till I became one mist of soul and mounted to the sky.” — Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

“If I adore You out of fear of Hell, burn me in Hell!
If I adore you out of desire for Paradise,
Lock me out of Paradise.
But if I adore you for Yourself alone,
Do not deny to me Your eternal beauty.” — Rābiʿa Basri

“If I seem a little bizarre, remember the wild profusion of my inheritance . . . perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.” — Salman Rushdie

“And we probably have some idea or expectation. That is natural and lovely; it is what we have brought with us. It also doesn’t matter at all. Because our practice is not about confirming or contradicting anything we think; it is about stepping into something new and unknown, something for which we are truly unprepared — the practice of something shining, of waking up.
[…]
We will practice as if our hair is on fire. And when we find ourselves lost in inattention, distraction or judgement, we will wake up and start from there — from right there, inside our lostness […] for there is something wide and boundless in which we live, in which we cannot be lost.” — Anthony Osler

“For me, it is looking at the night for so long that my eyes ache and I’m stuck seeing stars for hours afterwards, watching the way the ocean sways itself to sleep, or as the sky washes itself in colors for which I know I will never have the words — a world made from layers of rock and fossil and glittered imaginings that keep tripping me up, demanding I pay attention to one leaf at a time, ensuring I can never pick up quite where I left off.” — Ella Frances Sanders

“I met a woman
once and asked her where love had led her.
“Fool, there’s no destination to arrive at.
Loved one and lover and love are infinite.”” — Farīd ud-Dīn ʿAṭṭār

“I don’t expect them to speak, and they don’t.
If being so beautiful isn’t enough, what
could they possibly say?” — Mary Oliver

“There is silence; but a silence that breathes with the soft breathing of the sea and, in the thin shrill noise of a cricket, insistently, incessantly harps on the fact of its own deep perfection. Far away, the passage of a train is like a long caress, moving gently, with an inexorable gentleness, across the warm living body of the night.” — Aldous Huxley

“So, then, if you can’t ever end things neatly, can’t ever put them back quite the way you found them, surely the alternative is to remain stubbornly carbonated with possibility, to never rest from your rotation. To keep assembling stories between us, stories about how everything was everything, about how much we loved.” — Ella Frances Sanders

“To celebrate, or to dwindle into dullness, seems to me the law at work here.” — Ben Okri

“Hold this moment forever, I tell myself; it may never come again.” — Pico Iyer

“as when some Man apart
Answers aloud the Question in his Heart
‘The Sun of my Perfection is a Glass
Wherein from Seeing into Being pass
All who, reflecting as reflected see
Themselves in Me, and Me in Them: not Me,
But all of Me that a contracted Eye
Is comprehensive of Infinity:
Nor yet Themselves: no Selves, but of The All
Fractions, from which they split and whither fall.
As Water lifted from the Deep, again
Falls back in individual Drops of Rain
Then melts into the Universal Main.
All you have been, and seen, and done, and thought,
Not You but _I_, have seen and been and wrought” — Farīd ud-Dīn ʿAṭṭār

“Today we weep, tonight we dance. There is no conclusion to be reached about all this. Just coming across such delight and having our hearts opened is precious beyond compare.” — Anthony Osler

“O spirit, make thy head in search and seeking like the water of a stream.
And O reason, to gain eternal life tread everlastingly the way of death.
Keep God in remembrance till self is forgotten,
That you may be lost in the Called, without distraction of caller and call.” — Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

“And serve Allah and do not associate any thing with Him and be good to your parents.” — Qur’an 4:36

“We truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something — with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish.” — Haruko Murakami

“Behold, We shall cast upon thee a weighty word.” — Qur’an 73:5

“Please God, that we avoid the land of denial, and advance into the ocean of acceptance, so that we may perceive, with an eye purged from all conflicting elements, the worlds of unity and diversity, of variation and oneness, of limitation and detachment, and wing our flight unto the highest and innermost sanctuary of the inner meaning of the Word of God.” — Baha’u’llah

“Certainly, it is a decisive word” — Qur’an 86:13

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.” — Omar Khayyam

“It can only be known by heart and soul, not through mind and intellect […] The religion of God is abandonment unto God.” — Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri

“I am alone; make me your single goal -
My presence is sufficient for your soul;
I am your God, your one necessity -
With every breath you breathe, remember Me.” — Farīd ud-Dīn ʿAṭṭār

“So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!” — Kabîr

“We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth
[…]
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.” — Maya Angelou

“Come you lost Atoms to your Centre draw,
And be the Eternal Mirror that you saw:
Rays that have wander’d into Darkness wide
Return and back into your Sun subside.” — Farīd ud-Dīn ʿAṭṭār

“One day the sun admitted,
I am just a shadow.
I wish I could show you the infinite incandescence
That has cast my brilliant image!
I wish I could show you,
When you are lonely or in darkness,
The astonishing Light
Of your own Being!” — Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī

“We shall make you read so as not to forget.” — Qur’an 87:6

“True reading is a creative act. It means seeing first; and then a subsequent act of the imagination. Higher reading ought to be a subject in the universities of the future. As we read, so we are.” — Ben Okri

“The highest human achievement is synchronising outer rationality with inner intuition and insight. It requires reading the map of human creation, understanding it, and following it carefully and attentively until the reader and that which is being read unify.” — Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri

“This was my master’s way. He not only knew how to read the great book of nature, but also knew the way monks read the books of Scripture, and how they thought through them […] His explanation, moreover, seemed to me at that point so obvious that my humiliation at not having discovered it by myself was surpassed only by my pride at now being a sharer of it, and I was almost congratulating myself on my insight. Such is the power of truth that, like good, it is its own propagator.” — Umberto Eco

“A quiet academic career did not attract me. I felt a yearning to come into more intimate grips with life, to enter it without any of those carefully contrived, artificial defences which security-minded people love to build up around themselves; and I wanted to find by myself an approach to the spiritual order of things which, I knew, must exist.” — Muhammad Asad

“There is no greater gift a people can be given than that they live a life touched with fable.” — Ben Okri

“He just likes to hang around, dozing, smiling, sniffing the incense, watching our coming and going. It makes me happy to have him here; a reminder of our commitment to waking up, and an honouring of those who have made this commitment before us. When the children have their weekends here, the boys sleep in the zendo, which they call the China Church. One night Alpheus went up to the statue in the middle of the night and spoke to the Buddha in his mock-Mandarin; when the story got out in the morning, Margie asked Alpheus if the Buddha had answered him. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘he said to me, “Hello Alpheus, you are a big handsome boy.’” — Anthony Osler

“Buddhism is perhaps the only religion which is not based on the revelation of God nor on faith and devotion to God or gods of any kind. This does not mean that Buddha was an atheist or a heretic. He never argued theological or philosophical doctrines at all. He went straight to the heart of the matter, namely how to see the truth.” — Chögyam Trungpa

“The only doctrine that I have in music and music-making is that it basically comes out of the nature of paradox: that you have to have the extremes; that you have to find a way to put the extremes together, not necessarily by diminishing the extremity of each one, but to form the art of transition.” — Daniel Barenboim

“And in that moment, he was finally able to accept it all. In the deepest recesses of his soul, Tsukuru Tanazaki understood. One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.” — Haruko Murakami

“Because this unfamiliar world is so entirely different from all that you have known at home; because it offers so much that is strikingly strange in image and sound, it brushes you sometimes, if you permit yourself to be attentive, with a momentary remembrance of things long known and long forgotten: those intangible realities of your own life. And when this breath of remembrance reaches you from beyond the abyss that separates your world from that other, that unfamiliar one, you ask yourself whether it is not perhaps herein - and only herein - that the meaning of all wandering lies: to become aware of the strangeness of the world around you and thereby reawaken to your own, personal, forgotten reality.” — Muhammad Asad

“Muhammad must have sensed the full weight of revolution achieved, and known that to realize a dream was only to wake up to a more complex reality.” — Lesley Hazelton”

“Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness? Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is — and if we join them — your wild to mine — what’s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?” — Ross Gay

“And killing the Buddha means putting myself aside and taking into my heart whoever is in front of me.” — Anthony Osler

“It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself.” — Gabriel García Márquez

“If the eye of the heart is open, in each atom there will be one hundred secrets.” — Farīd ud-Dīn ʿAṭṭār

“Seams have a tendency to come apart with time — you and the universe are the same in this way, which makes for a delicately overwhelming struggle.” — Ella Frances Sanders

“You ask for a few words of comfort and guidance,
I quickly kneel at your side offering you this whole book as a gift.
You ache with loneliness one night so much you weep and I say,
Here’s a rope, tie it around me,
Hafiz will be your companion for life.” — Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī

“He had been touched into life by the ancient myth of the superman and by the brilliant angel of the beautiful darkness. A darkness that was, in truth, a new light.” — Ben Okri

“Art invites us to take the journey beyond price, beyond costs into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it from even the most tragic of circumstances. Art reminds us that we belong here. And if we serve, we last.” — Toni Morrison

“Beauty in art: the suddenly-kindled light of the the never-before-said. This light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man, and thus the novelists’ discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish us.” — Milan Kundera

“He wonders what makes the light so strong. Why can he just see white when he looks into it? Where are the greens and reds that dance across his clothes? He looks at his body — it is drenched in color. His arms, his hands, his legs, are luminous, brilliant. He feels the brilliance being absorbed through his skin, saturating his flesh, flowing through his blood all the way to his fingertips. He starts radiating brilliance himself. Brilliance that illuminates each row of empty seats, brilliance that paints each wall a blinding white, brilliance that turns the curtains into sheets of light. As Vishnu watches, the entire theater becomes incandescent. He looks down at himself, but he can no longer tell where the light ends and his body begins.” — Manil Suri

“And we know that what we have glimpsed is not magic, or art, or enchantment. We know in some obscure way, that the kingdom is real.” — Ben Okri

“Ah, my friend, the family treasure does not enter through the front gate; it rises in the heart and fills heaven and earth.” — Yen T’ou

“Let’s toast
Every rung we’ve climbed on Evolution’s ladder.
Whisper, “I love you! I love you!”
To the whole mad world.” — Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī

“and everything on this earth, little dreamer, little dreamer
of the new world, holy, every rain drop and sand grain and blade
of grass worthy of gasp and joy and love” — Ross Gay

“Sing away so that you recall the original song, until you are with the Songmaker and even songs do not matter anymore.” — Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri

“This is how we find ourselves once more in each other’s shoes. We walk, we work, we weep, and we fall asleep at the end of the day without illusion or regret. Now the question is no longer ‘Where can I run to?’ but ‘How can I live here?’ Not, ‘Who is to blame?’ but ‘How can I help?’ And, finally, in a voice so ordinary we hardly hear it, ‘Come inside. Would you like a cup of tea?’
[…]
The treasure of contentment with what-is is already here, filling our life, and now everything is shining — you, me, the innkeeper, the ashes in the fireplace. Yen T’ou’s kindness untied the knot in Hseuh Feng’s chest and opened his eyes.
[…]
Just this. It is a special kind of friendship, and completely ordinary. It wraps its arms around us, it challenges us to stay awake.” — Anthony Osler

“It was all for souls to grow
May it always have been so
Thy splendor brightly aglow
And so we say, may it be so” — Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

“Awake, my dear.
Be kind to your sleeping heart.
Take it out into the vast fields of Light and let it breathe.
Say, “Love, give me back my wings.
Lift me, lift me nearer.”
Say to the sun and moon, say to our dear Friend,
“I will take You up now, Beloved,
On that wonderful Dance You promised!”” — Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī

“It is impossible to say just what I mean!” — T. S. Eliot

“It is the deference that moves her, that recognition that language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. Language can never “pin down” slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.
[…]
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” — Toni Morrison

“When the Day came —
The Day I had lived and died for —
The Day that is not in any calendar —
Clouds heavy with love
Showered me with wild abundance.
Inside me, my soul was drenched.
Around me, even the desert grew green.” — Kabîr

“Nor I, nor thou, nor God, nor man. The “I”
Has All become, the All is “I” and Bliss.
Know thou art That, Sannyasin bold! Say –
“Om Tat Sat, Om!”” — Swami Vivekananda

“By precept and by example, the Avatar teaches that this transforming knowledge is possible, that all sentient beings are called to it and that, sooner or later, in one way or another, all must finally come to it.” — Aldous Huxley

“When the traveller on the path has completed
the circuit of return to separation, then his last point as man is
joined to the first of the Real.” — Shaykh Sa’d ud-Dīn Mahmūd Shabistārī

“And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke free on the open sky” — Pablo Neruda

“I will gather all people into well-being
Never again will they be divided or abased
Take out my hidden treasure
Realize my tidings
my readiness,
my imminent rising
I will rise and the stars will gather around me
I will bring sun and moon together
I will enter every dwelling
“Peace to you,” they will greet me
“And to you, peace,” I will reply
At my beckon, the hour will rise
I am the Almighty, the Compassionate.” — Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Jabbar ibn al-Hasan al-Niffarī

“…and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.” — Mary Oliver

“The hereafter encompasses the ‘here’ and the purpose of life is to evolve and realise the ever-perfect moment here, now and after. There has been nothing other than cascading divine light producing an infinite variety of shadows, all pointing to the ONE essence worthy of adoration and worship. To witness the light of the ONE is to witness only perfection.
We understand this revealed knowledge once we have been exposed to it because we all share in higher consciousness […] His program is that of participative evolution.” — Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri

“With Earth’s first Clay They did the Last Man knead,
And there of the Last Harvest sow’d the Seed:
And the first Morning of Creation wrote
What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.” — Omar Khayyam

“Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now.” — T. S. Eliot

“Whoever has sought Me has found Me. Whoever has found Me has come to know Me. Whoever has known Me has loved Me. Whoever has loved Me I have slain. Whomever I have slain the payment of the blood money is on Me, and I will Myself be the payment for the blood money that I owe.” — Hadith Qudsi

“Say, He is Allah, [who is] One,
Allah, the Eternal Refuge.
He neither begets nor is born,
Nor is there to Him any equivalent.” — Qur’an 112 (Surat Al-Ikhlas: The Chapter of Sincerity)

“You know all about the first creation — will you not remember and reflect?” — Qur’an 56:62

“No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All everything home” — Marie Howe