Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?

The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.

Theirs is the mystery of continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection.

We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.

Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation's short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.

No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.

Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.