#sm

He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights. 'White to play and mate in two moves.' Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates. ↗

— George Orwell

#chess #orwell #philosophy #mysticism

Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language. ↗

— Meister Eckhart

#mysticism

The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity. ↗

— George Orwell

#mystical #truth #words #mysticism

Here in this body are the sacred rivers: here are the sun and moon as well as all the pilgrimage places... I have not encountered another temple as blissful as my own body. ↗

— Saraha

#mysticism #object #perception #saraha #subject

A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#mysticism #mysticism

Switters was actually quite fond of Seattle's weather, and not merely because of it's ambivalence. He liked it's subtle, muted qualities and the landscape that those qualities encouraged if not engendered: vistas that seemed to have been sketched with a sumi brush dipped in quicksilver and green tea. It was fresh, it was clean, it was gently primal, and mystically suggestive. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#tom-robbins #mysticism

...all that is carried along by the stream's silvery cascade, rhythmically falling from the mountain, carried by its own current-- carried where? ↗

— John Paul II

#christianity #catholicism

Protestantism and Catholicism must not be compared to Sunnism and Shi'ism in the Islamic context as has been done by certain scholars. Sunnism and Shi'ism both go back to the origins of Islam and the very beginning of Islamic history whereas Protestantism is a later protest against the existing Catholic Church and came into being some fifteen hundred years after the foundation of Christianity. ↗

— Seyyed Hossein Nasr

#protestantism #shi-ism #sunnism #catholicism

What history can do is show that people have to take responsibility for what they activate out of their tradition. It’s not just a given thing one slavishly follows. You have to be accountable. ↗

— Karen L. King

#history #religion #traditions #religion

To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it. ↗

— Barbara Kingsolver

#dreams