“Of all the hardships and deprivations a people can suffer, I am not sure if the deprivations of art and culture are not the most devastating. As meat and rice are food for the body, art and culture are food for the soul. Starve the body and the person dies; starve the soul and the spirit dies.”
“Some journeys lead nowhere, but they set the spirit free”
“Let go of the people who dull your shine, poison your spirit, and bring you drama. Cancel your subscription to their issues.”
“Darinya, aku mengambil filosofi bahwa belajar adalah sikap berani menantang segala ketidakmungkinan; bahwa ilmu yang tak dikuasai akan menjelma di dalam diri manusia menjadi sebuah ketakutan. Belajar dengan keras hanya bisa dilakukan oleh seorang yang bukan penakut.”
“To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.”
“Ivanov: With a heavy head, with a slothful spirit, exhausted, overstretched, broken, without faith, without love, without a goal, I roam like a shadow among men and I don t know who I am, why I m alive, what I want. And I now think that love is nonsense, that embraces are cloying, that there s no sense in work, that song and passionate speeches are vulgar and outmoded. And everywhere I take with me depression, chill boredom, dissatisfaction, revulsion from life... I am destroyed, irretrievably!”
“What you re looking for is already inside you. You ve heard this before, but the holy thing inside you really is that which causes you to seek it. You can t buy it, lease it, rent it, date it, or apply for it. The best job in the world can t give it to you. Neither can succes, or fame, or financial security - besides which, there ain t no such thing.”
“If souls existed, they resided in flesh.”
“It s hard to say what makes the mind piece things together in a sudden lightning flash. I ve come to hold the human spirit in the highest regard. Like the body, it struggles to repair itself. As cells fight off infection and conquer illness, the spirit, too, has remarkable resilience. It knows when it is harmed, and it knows she the harm is too much to bear. If it deems the injury too great, the spirit cocoons the wound, in the same fashion that the body forms a cyst around infection, until the time comes that it can deal with it.”
“What we strive to restore and re-animate will never come from the promises of the middle class politicians, but will come instead from the spirit of the last Delphic prophecy, which foresaw that, ‘One day Apollo will return and it will be forever’.”
“Sometimes you have to look past a person’s mistakes to see God’s presence.”
“There is no ownership. There is only stewardship.”
“So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.”
“Up there in that room, as I see it, is the reading and the thinking-through, a theory of rivers, of trees moving, of falling light. Here on the river, as I lurch against a freshening of the current, is the practice of rivers. In navigating by the glow of the Milky Way, the practice of light. In steadying with a staff, the practice of wood.”
“Country music is the poetry of the American spirit.”
“The nineteenth century was the Age of Romanticism; for the first time in history, man stopped thinking of himself as an animal or a slave, and saw himself as a potential god. All of the cries of revolt against God - De Sade, Byron s Manfred , Schiller s Robbers , Goethe s Faust , Hoffmann s mad geniuses - are expressions of this new spirit. Is this why the spirits decided to make a planned and consistent effort at communication ? It was the right moment. Man was beginning to understand himself.”
“Das Misstrauen gegen den Geist ist Misstrauen gegen den Menschen selbst, ist Mangel an Selbstvertrauen.”