From Time Regained (1931), by Marcel Proust.
We can, perhaps, attach every creature who has caused us unhappiness to a divinity of which she is only the most fragmentary reflection, a divinity the contemplation of whom in the realm of idea will give us immediate happiness instead of our former pain. The whole art of living is to regard people who cause us suffering as, in a degree, enabling us to accept its divine form and thus to populate our daily life with divinities.
From A Chinese Garden of Serenity (1959), by Hung Tzu-cheng, translated by Chao Tze-chiang:
To concur with a web of circumstances is to dismiss it, and is like the harmony between flitting butterflies and fluttering flowers. To accord with an event is to nullify it, and is like the perfection of the full moon as round as a basin of water.
From A Philosophy of Solitude (1933), by John Cowper Powys.
Who has not heard of the psychological phenomenon known as Conversion? Well! just as the secular life of contemplation celebrates its own natural Mass, so there must come sometimes to a crowd-poisoned personality a startling moment of awakening that is exactly like a religious Conversion. We suddenly feel as if we had never beheld the actual face of the world before. In shame we recognize how many suns, how many moons, have come and gone, without one real flash of conscious awareness transporting our heavy souls. And we remember in a rush of remorse like the prodigal’s weeping with what a hard, corrupt, averted eye we have caught without catching, and noted without noting, that labouring moon, that melting and liquid landscape, those enchanted hedgerows. It is not merely the aesthetic or the poetical reaction to these things that I have in mind. What I am thinking of is an eternal necessity of human nature, like the eating or drinking of some sort of planetary sacrament, which is neglected at our peril. Yes, you can be as thick-skinned and unpoetical as you please; but there is a primeval necessity, harsh, inhuman, rugged, formidable–not in the least “artistic” or sentimental–about keeping our eye upon sun, moon, earth, sky, sea, and letting our nature grow “native and indued” to these solemn powers.
From Advice to a Young Poet (1949), by Llewelyn Powys.
The religion of poetry rests to-day, as it did in the time of Homer, on an impassioned appreciation of appearances. It is an austere religion that demands a certain detachment, a certain selfless dedication. When once, however, we have become initiates, how rich is our reward! Never again, not for a single moment, can we become submerged by the importunities of unillumined reality; the least favourable daily incident finding a place in our particular poetic perspective, in this inspired perspective that never loses sight of our lot upon this planet, a planet dancing in sunlit space, inhabited by animals grown wise; by a breed of dreamers malign and magnanimous, sturdily camped in their generations upon a corn-bearing tilth, and covetous of an unending spirit life.
From Early Prose Writings, 1834-1843 (1903), by John Ruskin.
Let two persons go out for a walk; the one a good sketcher, the other having no taste of the kind. Let them go down a green lane. There will be a great difference in the scene as perceived by the two individuals. The one will see a lane and trees; he will perceive the trees to be green, though he will think nothing about it; he will see that the sun shines, and that it has a cheerful effect, but that the trees make the lane shady and cool; and he will see an old woman in a red cloak; c’est voilà tout!
But what will the sketcher see? His eye is accustomed to search into the cause of beauty, and penetrate the minutest parts of loveliness. He looks up, and observes how the showery and subdivided sunshine comes sprinkled down among the gleaming leaves overhead, till the air is filled with the emerald light, and the motes dance in the green, glittering lines that shoot down upon the thicker masses of clustered foliage that stand out so bright and beautiful from the dark, retiring shadows of the inner tree, where the white light again comes flashing in from behind, like showers of stars; and here and there a bough is seen emerging from the veil of leaves, of a hundred varied colours, where the old and gnarled wood is covered with the brightness,–the jewel brightness of the emerald moss, or the variegated and fantastic lichens, white and blue, purple and red, all mellowed and mingled into a garment of beauty from the old withered branch. Then come the cavernous trunks, and the twisted roots that grasp with their snake-like coils at the steep bank, whose turfy slope is inlaid with flowers of a thousand dyes, each with his diadem of dew: and down like a visiting angel, looks one ray of golden light, and passes over the glittering turf–kiss, kiss, kissing every blossom, until the laughing flowers have lighted up the lips of the grass with one bright and beautiful smile, that is seen far, far away among the shadows of the old trees, like a gleam of summer lightening along the darkness of an evening cloud.
Hat tip:Brain Pickings.
From A Chinese Garden of Serenity (1959), by Hung Tzu-ch’eng, translated by Chao Tze-chiang:
Manure-worms are dirty, and yet they transform themselves into cicadas, which drink dew in the autumnal wind. Decayed grasses are not bright, and yet they give birth to glow-worms, whose luster matches the summer moon. Hence we know that cleanliness often comes from filth and brilliance from gloom.
From Rainer Maria Rilke: A Study in Poetry and Mysticism (1931), by Federico Olivero.
Poetry is an aspiration towards the unknown; the poet goes beyond the limits of logical thought and enters into a region of continual changes and boundless imagination. This conception of Rilke is suitable for his mature work, from the Buch der Bilder onwards. His poetry arises from his mystical idea of life and death and from the artist’s inborn tendency towards oversensitiveness so as to make an abstract and metaphysical nature out of material nature, and universal and abstract sentiments out of his enthusiasms and griefs. While the poet tries to grasp the intimate signification and meaning of life and of the world, material reality dissolves when in contact with his fervid imagination; and therefore his poetry is this same dissociation of matter in another substance, and with the extension of sensation, an expansion of his internal life. The artistic power of nature–by aesthetically moulding according to divine laws–gives rise to a reality of elating beauty; but the poet feels that under this reality, there is another which he discovers and fathoms, a beauty in perfect order and harmonizing with the rhythm of his spirit, instead of that external beauty which is apparently indistinct and intricate. This sense of a second reality appears only in the poet’s hours of dreams and is only revealed to solitary minds. The material world dissolves under the poet’s glance and is observed not from the outside but from the inside. Therefore his poetry is not a copy or picture of external things but a study and image of the intimate part of life and nature,–of that which is beyond appearances and which lies deeply hidden under the surface. The poet tries to penetrate to the lowest depth of every being full of life and beauty up to their external margins; and this depth which he discovers becomes a new form of his vision. The poet is at once a creator and expounder; the former because he gives us new forms and sentiments, and the latter since he explains life and nature according to his ideas. The new poetical world comes to him from his inmost being; sunsets, dawns, the gold quivering of a birch-tree in the autumn, evening and twilight are images of his sentiments, and all things are coloured by his passion, and the universe is reflected in him, but transformed by his soul.
From A Chinese Garden of Serenity (1959), by Hung Tzu-ch’eng, translated by Chao Tze-chiang:
A taste derived from tranquility and ease is dilute, but lasts longer.
From The Art Spirit (1923), by Robert Henri.
When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressive creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and opens ways for better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it and shows there are still more pages possible. The world would stagnate without him, and the world would be beautiful with him; for he is interesting to himself and he is interesting to others. He does not have to be a painter or sculptor to be an artist. He can work in any medium. He simply has to find the gain in the work itself, not outside it.
From The Art Spirit (1923), by Robert Henri.
There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual–become clairvoyant. We reach then into reality. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. It is in the nature of all people to have these experiences; but in our time and under the conditions of our lives, it is only a rare few who are able to continue in the experience and find expression for it.
From A Chinese Garden of Serenity (1959), by Hung Tzu-ch’eng, translated by Chao Tze-chiang:
To be conscientious is an admirable virtue, but to be painstaking does not tranquilize the mind or delight the heart. To be contented is noble, but to be lethargic does not enable one to benefit men or to utilize things.
From Sexus (1949), by Henry Miller.
From the little reading I had done I had observed that the men who were most in life, who were moulding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State. They were interested in truth and in truth alone. They recognized only one kind of activity: creation. Nobody could command their services because they had of their own pledged themselves to give all. They gave gratuitously, because that is the only way to give. This was the way of life which appealed to me: it made sound sense. It was life–not the simulacrum which those about me worshipped.