Most accounts of mystical experiences... insist that the Other in the encounter appears to be "living" or alive, as in "living God." But is it alive in any biological sense? Does it eat and metabolize? Does it reproduce - an option that monotheism wo...
The attempt of to reform chemical nomenclature is premature. One single experiment may destroy the whole filiation of his terms; and his string of sulphates, sulphites, and sulphures, may have served no end than to have retarded the progress of scien...
Your young white, who gathers his learning from books and can measure what he knows by the page, may conceit that his knowledge, like his legs, outruns that of his fathers’, but, where experience is the master, the scholar is made to know the value...
Human nature has its fatal weaknesses, but 'love' means embracing the whole of human nature, the bad within the good, the benign within the malicious, the beautiful within the tragic. 'Love' is the experience of this whole, its unfinished parts, incl...
I wanted desperately to get all hot and sweaty with this guy, but I knew from experience that hormones affected my sensibilities like alcohol or pot. In the throes of passion I tend to vow my eternal love to a penis I might use and abuse, with little...
Teaching is the art of serendipity. Each of us has the experience of finding out that something we intended as only the most casual of remarks, or the stray example, changes the way some students thought to the point of changing their lives.
...Anxiety and panic happen to be mundane phenomena, i.e., even when they are caused by extraordinary things like war and rape, they tend to occur when things are ordinary and predictable and relatively stable, against a backdrop of normal, everyday ...
For Leopardi, unhappy hedonist that he was, what is unknown is always more attractive than what is known; hope and imagination are the only consolations for the disappointments and sorrows of experience. Man therefore projects his desire into infinit...
Escapism isn't good or bad of itself. What is important is what you are escaping from and where you are escaping to. I write from experience, since in my case I escaped to the idea that books could be really enjoyable, an aspect of reading that teach...
I felt the presence of the night all about me: a living, breathing entity, whispering soft words against my flesh. I had never before felt the silken touch of the night caress me as I did now. It was a frightening, yet exhilarating experience. ...
It seemed like it was always autumn in this field - it was fitting really. Everything was shaded with the bronzes and yellows of faded pictures from an old photo album, it was a realm where uncomfortable nostalgia reigned. I noticed it more after my ...
This is the story of an electrically alive young woman on the brink of her adult life. An artist equally attuned to the light as the shadows, with a limitless hunger for experience and knowledge, completely unafraid of life's more frightening opportu...
Is being burnt a requisite for the making of art? Personally, I don't think it is. But art is poultice for a burn. It is a privilege to have, somewhere within you, a capacity for making something speak from your own seared experience.
If we rely on anything else besides faith to maintain the practice of the presence of God, we will certainly fail, whether this is our feelings, or experiences, or sincerity, or good intentions, or reasonings, or plans. The reason these things will f...
The trouble with psychics is that they convince you that you get this future no matter what you do. It is as though you can cheat the universe out of your experiences, that you need only tweak something here or there to live happily ever after. It al...
The object is evident in the name of the discipline. Similarly, theology (theologia) is the study of God. The object of theology is not the church’s teaching or the experience of pious souls. It is not a subset of ethics, religious studies, cultura...
What makes the self? Experiences. Acculturation. What else? I don't know. What's within you. She says, I don't know what was within me and what got put there by my life as it was lived. You can never know that. No. But there is a you that was there b...
We had started out caring about each other, but in the end none of us knew how to care for each other. But this experience taught me that a community based on the idea that everyone hates rules is, in the end, just as disappointing and oppressive as ...
Wrong, and wrong agains,' he said. 'The likeness is already there. The metaphor only sees it. And it is not a mere figure of speech. It is the very essence of our minds as we seek to make sense of our surroundings, our experiences, ourselves, seeing ...
I'd had nearly four years of experience looking at these clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight to the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has be...
Creativity is a renewable resource. Challenge yourself every day. Be as creative as you like, as often as you want, because you can never run out. Experience and curiosity drive us to make unexpected, offbeat connections. It is these nonlinear steps ...
