Every now and then I jot down extracts from books that I'm reading that I find profound, thought provoking or just merely interesting. Perhaps others may find these extracts interesting as well.
These are in no particular order and some books tend to have quite a number of quotes attached while others only a line or two. No real reason for this apart from having a pen and notebook handy at the time.
The very existence of a self-contained material world is an illusion
Godwin Harmonies of Heaven and earth
Aether—the all permeating 5th element. Hence quintessential.
Godwin
The recognition that a subtle or aethetic essence is involved in human vitality is almost universal.
Godwin
Both music and the soul share a basis in number.
Boethius from Godwin
There is a spark of divine consciousness in every particle of matter.
Godwin
I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance. And when I saw my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn: he was the spirit of gravity - through him all things fall. Not by wrath, but by laughter, do we slay. Come let us slay the spirit of gravity.
I learned to walk; since then I have let myself run. I learned to fly; since then I do not need pushing in order to move from a spot. Now I am light, now do I fly; now do I see myself under myself. Now there danceth a God in me.-
Nietzsche Thus Spake Zarathustra
Beat is not rhythm but the last sad skeleton of rhythm stripped bare of human life
Roger Scruton The Aesthetics of Music
An ignorant man thinks everything possible
Kafka The Castle
"Faith" that which enables us to believe that which we know to be untrue
Kafka The Castle
We degrade God too much ascribing to him our ideas, in vexation at being unable to understand him. But, again, if it's impossible to understand him, I repeat it's hard to have an answer for what is not given to man to understand. And, if it is so, how shall I be judged for being unable to understand the laws of providence?
Dostoevsky The Idiot
And who over the ruins of his life pursued its fleeting fluttering significance, while he suffered its seeming meaninglessness and lived its seeming madness, and who hoped in secret at the last turn of the labyrinth of chaos for revelation and God's presence
Hesse Steppenwolf
...man is perhaps not really a half rational animal but a child of the Gods and destined to immortality
Hesse Steppenwolf
The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure
Hesse Steppenwolf
...those souls that find the aim of life not in the perfecting and moulding of the self, but in liberating themselves by going back to the mother, back to God, back to the all
Hesse Steppenwolf
His life oscillates as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands and thousands.
Hesse Steppenwolf
In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
Hesse Steppenwolf
And eternity was nothing else than the redemption of time, and its return to innocence so to speak, and its transformation into space.
Hesse Steppenwolf
Music is a representation of invisible things.
Da Vinci
Impatience is the mother of stupidity
Da Vinci
Today, a particularly insidious obstacle to the task of education is the massive presence in our society and culture of that relativism which, recognising nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires. And under the semblance of freedom, it becomes a prison for each one, for it separates people from one another, locking each person into his or her own ego.
Pope Benedict XVI