Corene > Corene's Quotes

“Stuff your eyes with wonder. Live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that . Shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Where there is to be creative action, it is quite beside the point to discuss what we should or should not do in order to be right or good. A mind that is single and sincere is not interested in being good, in conducting relations with other people so as to live up to a rule. Nor, on the other hand, is it interested in being free, in acting perversely just to prove its independence. Its interest is not in itself, but in the people and problems of which it is aware; these are “itself.” It acts, not according to the rules, but according to the circumstances of the moment, and the “well” it wishes to others is not security but liberty.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“But you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

“To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

“He goes because he must, as Galahad went towards the Grail: knowing that for those who can live it, this alone is life.”
― Evelyn Underhill

“For a lack of attention a thousand forms of loveliness elude us everyday”
― Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness

“Now I know that uncertainty is the greatest miracle of all. When we hold ourselves open to the possibility of error, a blessing can arrive that we never imagined possible. The oceans can part and offer a way forward. A question blooms season after season, yielding new flowers, new ideas. But an answer is solid. It bears only one fruit. And very often, it is the wrong fruit.”
― Sophie Strand, The Madonna Secret

“Adam's final act of naming is to name his wife, Eve, inaugurating the religious basis for the masculine's ownership over the feminine. What we name, we often feel we own. What we name, we feel we understand well enough to name. And when we believe we have arrived at understanding, we stop asking questions. We close ourselves off from surprise.”
― Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine

“Lost love is still love, isn’t it.”
― Kate Manning, Gilded Mountain

“Even now I cling to the idea that amour fou, curdled as it was, still had me in its grip. I want to believe this. If you do not act out of some form of love, then who are you in the world?”
― Kate Manning, Gilded Mountain

“Why is love beyond all measure of other human possibilities so rich and such a sweet burden for the one who has been struck by it? Because we change ourselves into that which we love, and yet remain ourselves. Then we would like to thank the beloved, but find nothing that would do it adequately. We can only be thankful to ourselves. Love transforms gratitude into faithfulness to ourselves and into an unconditional faith in the Other. Thus love steadily expands its most intimate secret. Closeness here is existence in the greatest distance from the other- the distance that allows nothing to dissolve - but rather presents the “thou” in the transparent, but “incomprehensible” revelation of the “just there”. That the presence of the other breaks into our own life - this is what no feeling can fully encompass. Human fate gives itself to human fate, and it is the task of pure love to keep this self-surrender as vital as on the first day.”
― Martin Heidegger