The Unknown Heart

"For surely all must admit that a man may be puffed and belauded, envied, ridiculed, counted upon as a tool and fallen in love with, or at least be selected as a future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown - known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbors false suppositions."


George Eliot
Middlemarch

The pleasure of a new acquaintance

"One can begin so many things with a new person! - even begin to be a better man."

George Eliot
Middlemarch

Havel's Musings on the Phenomenological Structure of the Universe - 4

"The fourth and final order....is nothing more and nothing less than the real order of things, of human things above all, the reality around us, its rules, customs, circumstances, relationships - just as they are, which means full of variety, contradictions, complexities, with everything that is good and bad, pretty and ugly, meaningful and absurd.  It is simply the 'mishmash of everything' that we call life.  It includes not only the sphere of established practices, customs, conventions, prejudices and habits, etc., but also the sphere of natural and healthy demands and reasonable expectations.  It is a certain system of activity into which one may enter responsibly or irresponsibly, to fulfill the best in oneself or to realize the worst; to change that order for the better or to develop everything in it that is base, distorted and alienating.  But regardless of how he does it or of the quality of his intentions, man may enter and find a place in this order easily, authentically, spontaneously and with supreme confidence, or on the contrary, he may find his efforts from start to finish accompanied by degrees of uncertainty, doubts or a gnawing sensation of his own strangeness."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Havel's Musings on the Phenomenological Structure of the Universe - 3

"Over and against this passionate order, which is the work of people created 'in God's image,' there constantly recurs its evil caricature and misshapen protagonist, 'the bastard son of Being,' the offspring of indifference to the meaning of Being and vindictive fear of its mystery: the chilling work of man as 'the image of the devil': the order of homogenization by violence, perfectly organized impotence and centrally directed desolation and boredom, in which man is conceived as a cybernetic unit without free will, without the power to reason for himself, without a unique life of his own, and where that monstrous idea, order, is a euphemism for the graveyard.  (I refer you to Fromm's excellent analysis of fascism.)

Thus against 'the order of life,' sustained by a longing for meaning and an experience of the mystery of Being, there stands this 'order of death,' a monument to non-sense, an executioner of mystery, a materialization of nothingness."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Havel's Musings on the Phenomenological Structure of the Universe - 2

"Alongside the general miracle of being - both as a part of that miracle and as its protagonist, as a special reiteration of it and rebellious attempt to know, understand, control and transcend it - stands the miracle of the human spirit, of human existence.  Into the infinite silence of the omnipresent order of Being, then there sounds the impassioned voice of the order of human freedom, of life, of spirit.  The subtly structured world of meaningful and hopeful human life, opening new vistas of freedom and carrying man to a deeper experience of Being, the countless remarkable intellectual (mystical, religious, scientific) and moral system, that special way in which the order of Being both re-creates and, at the same time, lends its own meaning to mythology (in earlier times) and artistic creation (today, i.e., in the historical period), in short the way in which man becomes man in the finest sense of the word - all of this constitutes the 'order of life,' 'the order of the spirit,' 'the order of human work.'  Together, it all constitutes an objectivized expression of that 'second creation of the world,' which is human existence.

I would say that this 'order of life' is a kind of 'legitimate son,' of the order of Being,' because it grows out of an indestructible faith in the latter's meaning and a fearless confrontation with its mystery."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Havel's Musings on the Phenomenological Structure of the Universe - 1

"Behind all phenomena and discrete entities in the world, we may observe, intimate or experience existentially in various ways something like a general 'order of being.'  The essence and meaning of this order are veiled in mystery; it is as much an enigma as the Sphinx, it always speaks to us differently and always, I suppose, in ways that we ourselves are open to, in ways, to put it simple, that we can hear."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

The Work Itself

"The work itself, the pleasure of finding a field for my peculiar powers, is my highest reward."

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Sign of the Four

"Realization"

"By realization I mean a wonderful experience of peace, goodness,, and beauty; when the world makes sense and there is an all-pervading unity of both substance and essence.  While such experience does not last, it cannot be forgotten.  It shines in the mind, both as memory and longing.  I know what I am talking about, for I have had such experiences."

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
I Am That

Nisargadatta is not the speaker of these words.  It is one actually one of his students questioning him.  Nisargadatta is even a bit dismissive of the experience. 

A Vision Quest

"Genius, he felt, is necessarily intolerant of fetters: on the one hand it must have the utmost play for its spontaneity; on the other, it may confidently await those messages from the universe which summon it to its peculiar work, only placing itself in an attitude of receptivity towards all sublime chances."

George Eliot
Middlemarch

"He" here is young Will Ladislaw heading for Europe.

Apollonian AND Dionysian

"But something she yearned for by which her life might be filled with action at once rational and ardent."

George Eliot
Middlemarch

The Difficulty of Jugding One Another - II

"Suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder with keener interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labors; what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within him; and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring his heart to its final pause.  Doubtless his lot is important in his own eyes; and the chief reason that we think he asks too large a place in our consideration must be our want of room for him, since we refer him to the Divine regard with perfect confidence; nay, it is even held sublime for our neighbor to expect the utmost there, however little he may have got from us."

George Eliot
Middlemarch

The Difficulty of Jugding One Another - I

"Opinion's but a fool, that makes us scan
the outward habit for the inward man."

Shakespeare
Pericles, Prince of Tyre

Chief Characteristics of Satori - 8

"8. Momentariness.  Satori comes upon one abruptly and is a momentary experience.  In fact, if it is not abrupt and momentary, it is not satori....This abrupt experience of satori, then, opens up in one moment...an altogether new vista, and the whole of existence is appraised from quite a new angle of observation."

D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism

Suzuki notes that Zen's genesis in the 7th century under Hui-neng was a result of an opposition to Shen-hsiu's doctrine of "a gradual unfoldment of Zen consciousness."

Timing

"After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not?  They may seem idle and weak because they are growing.  We should be very patient with each other, I think."

George Eliot
Middlemarch

I'm not that far in to Middlemarch yet, so I can't be certain about how Dorothea's statement is meant by Eliot to be taken.  Is it meant to show her naiveté?

However, Eliot meant it, this statement puts me in mind of Malcolm Gladwell's distinctions between early and late bloomers.  Without someone in the late bloomer's life who can see this truth, few late bloomers will ever bear fruit.

Havel and Community

"...my well-known Passion for bringing people together, reconciling them and acting as a 'social binding agent' an obvious expression of a heightened longing for harmony and for a creative role in it."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Bourgeois Virtues

"...to give some credit to my bourgeois origins, which all my life have brought me nothing but complications...even when  - paradoxically - I was in a state of vehement inner revolt against everything bourgeois around me, I cannot rule out the fact that my own 'relentlessness,' my 'indestructability,' my unsinkable (because anti-illusionary) faith that things have a meaning, and finally my special ability to extricate myself, somehow, from hopeless situations (and even to profit from them) are related to that traditional quality of middle-classness (particularly in the era of liberalism), which is the ability to take risks, the courage to start all over again from nothing, the ever vital hope and élan to begin new enterprises."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga