Quotes about Transcendence

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, and all of heaven we have here below.

'Tis heaven itself, that points out an hereafter, and intimates eternity to man.

I'm sick to death—Oh when shall I get loose From this vain world, the abode of guilt and sorrow! —And yet methinks a beam of light breaks in On my departing soul. Alas! I fear 95 I've been too hasty. O ye powers that search The heart of man, and weigh his inmost thoughts, If I have done amiss, impute it not!— The best may err, but you are good, and—oh!  [Dies.]

Self is the soul minus God.

Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence--religious meaning--apart from God as revealed through the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but at least, in America, almost never against the crowds.

God reveals himself, that is, in creation and in Christ, in ways we can see and hear and touch and taste, in place and person. Beauty is the term we apply to these hints of transcendence, these perceptions that there is more going on here than we can account for. And that is how we come to identify as apostles of the gospel the men and women and, yes, children, who use words and images and sounds and textures to wake us up to beauty latent and implicit all around us.

In a world where nearly everything can be weighed, explained, quantified, subjected to psychological analysis and scientific control, I persist in making the center of my life a God whom no eye hath seen, nor ear heard, whose will no one can probe.

Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.

Love is the ultimate truth at the heart of the universe and transcends all boundaries.

Love is the door to eternity.

Love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.

Faith and hope bring us through time but leave us at the doorstep of eternity. Only love goes with us inside.