Quotes about Transcendence

In the end, only something endowed with mystery is worthy of love. It is impossible to love something stripped of mystery; at best it would be a thing one uses as one sees fit.

The theme, then, that will be with us throughout this study is the reciprocal relationship of God's transcendence and God's immanence;

God is not "Being" but beyond being, because being necessarily includes multiplicity. Yet this "many", as Maximus explains along with Pseudo-Dionysius, is always such only because of unity.

Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal.

One bright morning when my work is over I will fly away home.

What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak to the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind.

Robbed of its reference to a transcendent spiritual being or substance that nonetheless personally engages with humanity while holding them responsible to its specific directives on how to live, this "love" ("God") has no recourse but to become whatever the current ideology says it is. Currently that means not treating people as different, while liberating them and enabling them to do what they want.

Poetry reaches to the realm beyond the world of sight and sound to reveal what our senses long to see and hear. It is the language not so much of the sublime, but of the truly real.

I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep you are not. And when you are filled with sleep you never were.

the long sleep that outlasts love

Where [God] is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the absolutely final things.