Quotes about Transcendence

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.

Music cleanses the understanding; inspires it, and lifts it into a realm which it would not reach if it were left to itself.

Death surrenders us totally to God: it makes us enter into him; we must, in return, surrender ourselves to death with absolute love and self-abandonment since, when death comes, all we can do is to surrender ourselves completely to the domination and guidance of God.

Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.

Keeping our eyes on journey's end is what we need - the place where we see at last the world that is greater than the world, the new creation that cannot be contained in present thought or social order or piety.

Love is a spirit, and therefore cannot die a natural death.