Transcendence Quotes

Music is the great unifier. It doesn’t matter which country you’re in or what language is being spoken, the fans just magically seem to get it. They share a common goal of love and celebration for the purity of magnificence and brilliance that has been created by the artist. It’s transcendent. It’s inspiration. It’s raw emotion. It’s communication – a perfect marriage of notes, harmonies, lyrics and melodies. It’s the beauty within the beast.

~ J.m. Nevins

...only very few - only humans, as far as we know - achieve the second level of transcendent movement. Through this, the environment is de-restricted to become the world as an integral whole of manifest and latent elements. The second step is the work of language. This not only builds the 'house of being' - Heidegger took this phrase from Zarathustra's animals, which inform the convalescent: 'the house of being rebuilds itself eternally'; it is also the vehicle for the tendencies to run away from that house with which, by means of its inner surpluses, humans move towards the open. It need hardly be explained why the oldest parasite in the world, the world above, only appears with the second transcendence.

~ Peter Sloterdijk

Everybody has a second personality, it may possess and make you do whatever it likes.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

To love, you close your eyes. To do good, you deceive oneself. To be honest, you ditch oneself. To be good, you have to transcend all the three ideas.

~ Harshit Walia

Dream Song:As my eyes Search the prairie, I feel the summer in the spring. Whenever I pause The noise Of the village.

~ Frances Densmore

Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom I am swallowing the whole universe with it and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space?

~ D.t. Suzuki

Christianity grasped perfectly that there is an element in the apparent contingency of love that can’t be reduced to that contingency. But it immediately raised it to the level of transcendence, and that is the root of the problem. This universal element I too recognize in love as immanent. But Christianity has somehow managed to elevate it and refocus it onto a transcendent power. It’s an ideal that was already partly present in Plato, through the idea of the Good. It is a brilliant first manipulation of the power of love and one we must now bring back to earth. I mean we must demonstrate that love really does have universal power, but that it is simply the opportunity we are given to enjoy a positive, creative, affirmative experience of difference. The Other, no doubt, but without the “Almighty-Other”, without the “Great Other” of transcendence.

~ Alain Badiou

Now, what’s stirring in this murky sea of complexity and foolishness is an almost suffocating need to breathe fresh history.

~ Laurie Perez

One cannot transcend the body or mind just by repeating the mantra I am not the body and I am not the mind.

~ Amit Ray

I once renounced my home in Calcutta, and roamed around the villages of Bengal as a monk. But after I attained the Absolute Divine state of Unification with the Universe, I realized that the purpose of life is not renunciation of anything, but the realization of the purpose itself.

~ Abhijit Naskar

The closest analogy, the one her brain reached for and rejected and reached for again, was splashing into a lake. It was cold, but not cold. There was a smell, rich and loamy. The smell of growth and decay. She was aware of her body, the skin, the sinew, the curl of her gut. She was aware of the nerves that were firing in her brain as she became aware of the nerves firing in her brain. She unmade herself and watched herself being unmade. All the bacteria on her skin and in her blood, the virii in her tissues. The woman who had been Elvi Okoye became a landscape. A world. She fell farther in.

~ James S.a. Corey

...the Master and the boy followed each other as if drawn along the wires of some mechanism, until soon it could no longer be discerned which was coming and which going, which following and which leading, the old or the young man. Now it seemed to be the young man who showed honour and obedience to the old man, to authority and dignity; now again it was apparently the old man who was required to follow, serve, worship the figure of youth, of beginning, of mirth. And as he watched this at once senseless and significant dream circle, the dreamer felt alternately identical with the old man and the boy, now revering and now revered, now leading, now obeying; and in the course of these pendulum shifts there came a moment in which he was both, was simultaneously Master and small pupil; or rather he stood above both, was the instigator, conceiver, operator, and onlooker of the cycle, this futile spinning race between age and youth.

~ Hermann Hesse

[Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief. (130)

~ Stephen Batchelor

We have within ourselves as a species, the ability to find the beauty in everything. And once we master it, we will be some of the gentlest creatures that ever evolved.

~ Tom Althouse

Hatred never ceases with hatred, but with love alone is healed.

~ T. Scott Mcleod

As I see it the world is undoubtedly in need of a new religion, and that religion must be founded on humanist principles. When I say religion, I do not mean merely a theology involving belief in a supernatural god or gods; nor do I mean merely a system of ethics, however exalted; nor only scientific knowledge, however extensive; nor just a practical social morality, however admirable or efficient. I mean an organized system of ideas and emotions which relate man to his destiny, beyond and above the practical affairs of every day, transcending the present and the existing systems of law and social structure. The prerequisite today is that any such religion shall appeal potentially to all mankind; and that its intellectual and rational sides shall not be incompatible with scientific knowledge but on the contrary based on it.

~ Julian Huxley

Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? ... No other human institution comes close.

~ Carl Sagan

Worship, then, needs to be characterized by hospitality; it needs to be inviting. But at the same time, it should be inviting seekers into the church and its unique story and language. Worship should be an occasion of cross-cultural hospitality. Consider an analogy: when I travel to France, I hope to be made to feel welcome. However, I don't expect my French hosts to become Americans in order to make me feel at home. I don't expect them to start speaking English, ordering pizza, talking about the New York Yankees, and so on. Indeed, if I wanted that, I would have just stayed home! Instead, what I'm hoping for is to be welcomed into their unique French culture; that's why I've come to France in the first place. And I know that this will take some work on my part. I'm expecting things to be different; indeed, I'm looking for just this difference. So also, I think, with hospitable worship: seekers are looking for something our culture can't provide. Many don't want a religious version of what they can already get at the mall. And this is especially true of postmodern or Gen X seekers: they are looking for elements of transcendence and challenge that MTV could never give them. Rather than an MTVized version of the gospel, they are searching for the mysterious practices of the ancient gospel.

~ James K.a. Smith

The entity God created to traffic His transcendence has fallen far from its mission when it chooses instead to traffic what can be found on any street corner or at the local mall. You may ask, But how has the church done that? * By offering secularists what they find mildly interesting and calling it church.*By submitting to self-help sermons where encounter with God is not even on the agenda.* By letting the horizontal excellence of the show stand in for Vertical impact.*By substituting the surprise or shock of superficial entertainment for the supernatural.Church was designed to deliver what we were created to long for. Church must again be about a Vertical encounter that interrupts and alters everything.

~ James Macdonald

In a society where rationality has ruled so long, the church frequently fails to see that in forsaking the weekly pursuit of the transcendent, we have given up the only ground that was uniquely ours in this world. In attempting to make the church something that can attract and add value to secular mind-sets, we have turned our backs on our one true proposition - transcendence.

~ James Macdonald

Terror and rapture to Emily Dickinson are alternative words for transport.

~ Harold Bloom

Truth could never be wholly contained in words.

~ Catherine Marshall

A sense of Deity is inscribed on every heart. Nay, even idolatry is ample evidence of this fact.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

There are landscapes in which we feel above us not sky but space. Something larger, deeper than sky is sensed, is seen, although in such settings the sky itself is invariably immense. There is a place between the cerebrum and the stars where sky stops and space commences, and should we find ourselves on a particular prairie or mountaintop at a particular hour, our relationship with sky thins and loosens while our connection to space becomes solid as bone.

~ Tom Robbins

The mass-man would never have accepted authority external to himself had not his surroundings violently forced him to do so. As to-day, his surroundings do not so force him, the everlasting mass-man, true to his character, ceases to appeal to other authority and feels himself lord of his own existence. On the contrary the select man, the excellent man is urged, by interior necessity, to appeal from himself to some standard beyond himself, superior to himself, whose service he freely accepts...Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline — the noble life.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

It seemed to me that transhumanism was an expression of the profound human longing to transcend the confusion and desire and impotence and sickness of the body, cowering in the darkening shadow of its own decay. This longing had historically been the domain of religion, and was now the increasingly fertile terrain of technology.

~ Mark O'connell

The question is not what you look at, but what you see. It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Old age. All the facial detail is visible; all the traces life has left there are to be seen. The face is furrowed, wrinkled, sagging, ravaged by time. But the eyes are bright and, if not young, then somehow transcend the time that otherwise marks the face. It is as though someone else is looking at us, from somewhere inside the face, where everything is different. One can hardly be closer to another human soul.

~ Karl Ove Knausgård

Dream Song of Thunders:Sometimes I go about pitying Myself, While I am carried by the wind Across the sky.

~ Frances Densmore

I'm no one... I don't want to be anyone. I stepped into singularity to exist within a void. I'm no one... However, I am becoming... Imagination. I am grabbing conception, and leaving humanity behind. Humans have lost their sight, and individuality makes people blind to the truth. It makes people believe that anything is possible. Only nothing is possible. But then again, my words are the words of no one.

~ Lionel Suggs

Once you've caught a glimpse of the cosmos through the back doors of your church, it doesn't seem like such a big deal to suggest to a sweet young couple that they quit sleeping with other people.

~ Richard Lischer

You could think that you had won. But I woke up, I came back to myself. You won nothing. I transcended you years ago, I left you in the past, I chained you up in my dreams. You may leave me shaken at times, but never again will you leave me broken. You have no power over me.

~ Tamara Thiel

Science is implausible to untutored human common sense, but that in no way casts doubt on the correctness of well-established scientific findings. Feelings of transcendence are simply that—feelings—and, as such, have no capacity to reveal truths about a world external to the people who have them.

~ Russell Blackford

Viewed in this light, life itself appears as a dynamics of integration that is equipped with auto-therapeutic or 'endo-clinical' competencies and refers to a species-specific space of surprise. It has an equally innate and - in higher organisms - adaptively acquired responsibility for the injuries and invasions it regularly encounters in its permanently allocated environment or conquered surroundings. Such immune systems could equally be described as organismic early forms of a feeling for transcendence: thanks to the efficiency of these devices, which are constantly at the ready, the organism actively confronts the potential bringers of its death, opposing them with its endogenous capacity to overcome the lethal. Such functions have earned immune systems of this type comparisons to a 'body police' or border patrol. But as the concern, already at this level, is to work out a modus vivendi with foreign and invisible powers - and, in so far as these can bring death, 'higher' and 'supernatural' ones - this is a preliminary stage to the behaviour one is accustomed to terming religious or spiritual in human contexts. For every organism, its environment is its transcendence, and the more abstract and unknown the danger from that environment, the more transcendent it appears.

~ Peter Sloterdijk

Might we begin then to transform our passing illuminations into abiding light?

~ Huston Smith

One day, you would see,You have dropped your attire,The dirt you are carrying on your shoulderAnd your entire self!

~ Sayantan Sen

Transcendence is transformation.

~ Peter Watts

Forgetting is not forgettingForgetting is ‘Letting things pass’When Existence opens up to EssenceAnd rises above and beyondThe path of Transcendence opensLove goes beyond DeathThe body disappears The person livesIn LoveAnd in this LoveRemembrance is born(Page 91)

~ Neena Verma

You believed you could transcend the body as you aged, she tells herself. You believed you could rise above it, to a serene, nonphysical realm. But it’s only through ecstasy you can do that, and ecstasy is achieved through the body itself. Without the bone and sinew of wings, no flight. Without that ecstasy you can only be dragged further down by the body, into its machinery. Its rusting, creaking, vengeful, brute machinery.

~ Margaret Atwood

A true religious person should not think that “my religion alone is the right path and other religions are false.” Other religions are also so many paths leading to the same domain of transcendental bliss.

~ Abhijit Naskar