#ecstasy

Understanding is a kind of ecstasy ↗

— Carl Sagan

#understanding #science

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy. ↗

— Honore de Balzac

#die #ecstasy #men #spirits #while

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#contradictory #ecstasy #feelings #felt #heart

Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation. ↗

— Walter Benjamin

#destruction #ecstasy #frenzy #living #only

The dynamic, future-oriented, ecstatically inspired state of the evolutionary impulse is the new enlightenment that I am speaking about. The inner eye has become compelled by the ever-unfulfilled promise of creating the future at a higher level than what exists in the present moment. When the awakening to this powerful spiritual urgency becomes one’s irrevocable attainment and permanent state, one has surely landed on the yonder shore, where the evolutionary impulse has become the driving force of fundamental principle guiding the vehicle called the body, mind, and soul. . . . God is only as powerful in this world as those of us who have the courage and audacity to awaken in this way—to become one with our own impulse to evolve. That’s the awesome significance of being a human being who is awake. When you realize this for yourself, you discover what an extraordinary blessing it is to be who you are, in this world, right now. In fact, the whole point of the creative process is to be here—to participate fully, radically, consciously in the Universe Project. In this evolutionary context, the point of enlightenment is not merely to transcend the world so that you can be free of it but to embrace the world completely, to embrace the entire process as your self, knowing that you are the creative principle incarnate, and you have a lot of work to do. As an individual, you are instantaneously liberated, simply through taking that step, but your personal liberation is a mere by-product of finally embracing the awe-inspiring burden of the Universe Project, which in truth has been yours all along. ↗

— Andrew Cohen

#evolutionary-enlightenment #evolutionary-impulse #courage

I remember all too well the premiere of Ecstasy when I watched my bare bottom bounce across the screen and my mother and father sat there in shock. ↗

— Hedy Lamarr

#bare #bottom #bounce #ecstasy #father

Man thrives where angels would die of ecstasy and where pigs would die of disgust. ↗

— Kenneth Rexroth

#die #disgust #ecstasy #man #pigs

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#happiness #nature #nature

Young kids are taking Viagra, ecstasy. They even want instant sex. ↗

— Tim Reid

#even #instant #kids #sex #taking

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. ↗

— Jack London

#ecstasy #life #food