“Life here with the things of the earth is a sinking, a defeat, a failing of the wing.”

Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other. Everything breathes together.

We must close our eyes and invoke a new manner of seeing…a wakefulness that is the birthright of us all, though few put it to use.

But coming to human birth and lured by the courtships of this sphere, she takes up with another love, a mortal, leaves her father and falls.

Wherever it lies, under earth or over earth, the body will always rot.

The soul that beholds beauty becomes beautiful.

The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.

The vision is such that seeing and seen are one; object and act of vision have become identical.

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful as yet, do as the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful.

It is precisely because there is nothing within the One that all things are from it.

Never stop working on your statue until the divine glory of virtue shines out on you, until you see self-mastery enthroned upon its holy seat.

Intelligence inbound with the entire of reality, not fenced off, integral to that All. […] Then it was as if One voice sounded.

Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being.

Fear must be entirely banished. The purified soul will fear nothing.

You can only apprehend the Infinite by a faculty that is superior to reason.

Until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.

When we look outside of that on which we depend we ignore our unity; looking outward we see many faces; look inward and all is one head.

We’re special because dreams that are impossible anywhere else, come true here. That’s not just my story. That’s your story. That’s our story.

Madam President, speaking here in Dublin Castle it is impossible to ignore the weight of history, as it was yesterday when you and I laid wreaths at the Garden of Remembrance.

Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.

I discovered I was an Asian American when I arrived in the U.S. I didn’t identify as that before I came here.

Here is the secret of inspiration: Tell yourself that thousands and tens of thousands of people, not very intelligent and certainly no more intelligent than the rest of us, have mastered problems as difficult as those that now baffle you.

We learn from here the humility of the Holy One, Blessed is He.

Before we had our becoming here, we existed There, men other than now; we were pure souls.

The sculptor cuts away here, smoothes there, makes this line lighter, this other purer, until he or she has shown a beautiful face upon the statue.