"The goal of the mystic quest is union with the Divine. The mystic renounces this world and its attractions, and proceeds along the various stages and states of mystical experience. Some of these stages and states are attained by self-discipline and some are the gift of God. The final stage and state of mystical attainment is the experience of divine knowledge and vision in which the mystic becomes one with the Beloved, and abides in the Beloved forever. In such a relationship between the mystic and the Beloved there is no room for the distinction of sex."
-Emine Gursoy-Naskali, Women Mystics in Islam

"You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen.."
-Kahlil Gibran, The Madman

"Our virtues are conditioned, are demanded by our weakness."
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Gods

"If you find a needle in a haystack, don't tell anyone."
-The Old Farmer's Almanac, 1955

"Did you ever know a man who did not lose his luck if he fished, gunned, gadded, or loafed instead of attending promptly to his business?"
-The Old Farmer's Almanac, 1849

"At the age of ten girls make clay penises out of the thick mud. The phallus is meant to ensure a good husband for them. Every morning in the months of April and May, this Siva Puja is repeated. Siva is the name to reckon with."
-Michael Tobias, Voice of the Planet

Father William:
"I was trying to explain to you how the body of the church, which for centuries was also the body of all society, the people of God, has become too rich, and wide, and it carries along the dross of all the countries it has passed through, and it has lost its own purity."

Adso:
"I understand less and less."

Father William:
"So do I .. "

-Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

"Jesus Christ, the last vegetation god of the Neolithic Near East .. bloomed as a devastating sun, withering to all life. All he could die for was an afterworld."
-Monica Sjoo, The Great Cosmic Mother, page287

Into a soul absolutely free
From thoughts and emotion,
Even the tiger finds no room
To insert its fierce claws.

One and the same breeze passes
Over the pines on the mountain
And the oak trees in the valley;
And why do they give different notes?

No thinking, no reflecting,
Perfect emptiness;
Yet therein something moves,
Following its own course.

The eye sees it,
But no hands can take hold of it -
The moon in the stream.

Clouds and mists,
They are midair transformations;
Above them eternally shine the sun and the moon.

Victory is for the one,
Even before the combat,
Who has no thought of himself,
Abiding in the no-mind-ness of Great Origin.