"When we are mired in the relative world,……" — Peter Matthiessen
"When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions - such as merit, such as past, present, and future - our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment."
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Peter Matthiessen
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35 Quotes by Peter Matthiessen
Peter Matthiessen has 35 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
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The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at extraordinary times, to be of…
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Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had…
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Simplicity is the whole secret of well-being.
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I meditate for the last time on this mountain that is bare, though others all around are white with snow.…
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This world is painted on a wild dark metal
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There's an elegiac quality in watching [American wilderness] go, because it's our own myth, the American frontier, that's deteriorating before…
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My eye is fixed not on the ending of the book but on the feeling of that ending.
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Where to begin? Do we measure the relaxing of the feet? The moment when the eye glimpses the hawk, when…
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The sun is roaring, it fills to bursting each crystal of snow. I flush with feeling, moved beyond my comprehension,…
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I have never figured out how women work but I do know that their skin color has no significance. Black…
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Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure…
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Zen is really just a reminder to stay alive and to be awake. We tend to daydream all the time,…
See all 35 quotes by Peter Matthiessen »
More Abstractions Quotes
This quote is filed under Abstractions Quotes,
one of 74 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
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That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.
— Sarah Caldwell
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Accordingly, France Had Voltaire, and his school of negative thinkers, and England (or rather Scotland) had the profoundest negative thinker…
— John Stuart Mill
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If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described…
— Carl Sagan
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Of the many forms of false culture, a premature converse with abstractions is perhaps the most likely to prove fatal…
— George Boole
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The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He…
— Flannery O'Connor
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To be well used, creatures and places must be used sympathetically, just as they must be known sympathetically to be…
— Wendell Berry
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There are no steps to self-realization. There is nothing gradual about it. It happens suddenly and is irreversible. You rotate…
— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
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Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.
— Edmund Burke
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Perhaps the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time…
— Walt Whitman
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We want spiritual principles to be more than beautiful abstractions; we want them to actually transform our lives.
— Marianne Williamson
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For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or…
— Virginia Woolf
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For the Warrior of the Light, there are no abstractions.
— Paulo Coelho
See all 74 Abstractions Quotes »