David Wayne > David's Quotes

“There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock. People so tired, mutilated either by love or no love”
― Charles Bukowski

“For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life...If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature...Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.”
― C.G. Jung, The Red Book: A Reader's Edition

“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole.”
― C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

“I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Pulvis et umbra sumus. (We are but dust and shadow.)”
― Horace, The Odes of Horace

“Some people seemed to get all sunshine, and some all shadow…”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“So don't be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don't know what work they are accomplishing within you?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow.

Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations.

The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight.

The camera obscura.

Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”
― C.G. Jung

“Among the tales of sorrow and of ruin that came down to us from the darkness of those days there are yet some in which amid weeping there is joy and under the shadow of death light that endures. And of these histories most fair still in the ears of the Elves is the tale of Beren and Lúthien”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

“I have always been afraid... Always been pretending to follow you closely, alwyas been pretending to sharpen my teeth, when the truth is, I am ... scared to death just treading on your shadow.”
― Tite Kubo

“No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself. It’s like your shadow. It follows you everywhere. -Komura”
― Haruki Murakami, After the Quake

“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”
― William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion

“Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls.

(translation/paraphrase: Terence McKenna)”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“The poet was a fool
who wanted no conflict
among us, gods
or people.
Harmony needs
low and high,
as progeny needs
man and woman.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“The sun is the width of a human foot.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“Thinking is a sacred disease and sight is deceptive.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing for the known way is an impasse.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“Applicants for wisdom
do what I have done:
inquire within”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“Give me one man
from among ten thousand
if he is the best”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“One thunderbolt strikes
root through everything”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“If a thing loves, it is infinite.”
― William Blake

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”
― William Blake

“What is now proved was once only imagined.”
― William Blake