Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him.
Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons
Many decades after graduation
the students sneak back onto
the school-grounds at night
and within the pane-lit windows
catch me their teacher at the desk
or blackboard cradling a chalk:
someone has erased their youth,
and as they crouch closer to see
more it grows darker and quieter
than they have known in their lives,
the lesson never learned surrounds
them: why have they come? Is
there any more to memorize now
at the end than there was then—
What is it they peer at through shades
of time to hear, X times X repeated,
my vain efforts to corner a room’s
snickers? Do they mock me? Forever?
Out there my past has risen in
the eyes of all my former pupils but
I wonder if behind them others
younger and younger stretch away
to a day whose dawn will never
ring its end, its commencement bell.
Bill Knott
The greater part of human pain is unnecessary.
It is self created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life....
The pain that you create now is always some form of non acceptance,
some form of unconscious resistance to what is.
On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment.
On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity.
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
Civilization exists by geological consent,
subject to change without notice.
Will Durant, What is Civilization? 1946 Ladies' Home Journal
There's nothing so dangerous as sitting still.
You've only got one life, one youth,
and you can let it slip through your fingers
if you want to; nothing easier.
Most people do that.
Willa Cather, The Bohemian Girl
The only real voyage of discovery, the only Fountain of Youth,
consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes,
in seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of a hundred others,
in seeing the hundred universes that each of them sees.
Marcel Proust, The Maxims of Marcel Proust