Tuesday, November 3, 2020

Quotes on simplicity

Kierkegaard — according to Merold Westphal — "published a long review of a Danish novel [Two Ages] which appeared just as he was concluding his own book [Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing] and which fascinated him by providing an occasion for dealing with some of the same themes in a different setting." In the review, he "introduces inertia as a physical metaphor for the spiritual resistance to that dying to immediacy that the sacred seems to demand of us."
Quoting: Merold Westphal. God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion. (1984) Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987. p. 52.

"Love is greater than anything — love and Lady Poverty. Poverty is like a gift and a dependence. Everything for God and others. That’s above institutions, above permissions, above constitutions, and we need a taste of it; somewhere, somehow, we have to feel the ardor of it again."
The character of a priest in Michael Novak's novel The Tiber Was Silver, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co, 1961. p. 85.

"Complexity is just simplicity which refuses to be anything else."
poet Nayyirah Waheed, quoted in "Time and Time Again: An interview with Farah Salem," Sixty Inches From Center, April 2022

“The trouble about man is twofold: He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.”
Rebecca West, quoted in The Wall Street Journal, quoted in The Week, Sept. 27, 2013. p. 17.

"...[on Shabbat] I do not use money, do not spend time on any tasks related to my work as editor of Tikkun, and do not engage in any activity that would exert dominion or control over nature. This practice helps me foster and strengthen my understanding of the abundance that already is there."
Michael Lerner. The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right. HarperSanFrancisco, 2006. p. 316.

“The silence grew, becoming a kind of presence in the room.”
James Carroll. The Cloister. Nan A. Talese, March 6, 2018.

"The substance of a work is the impossible — what we have not been able to attain, what could not be given to us: the sum of all the things which were refused us."
E. M. Cioran. The Trouble With Being Born. (1973)(Trans. by Richard Howard.) New York: Arcade, 2012.

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