“I remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. This is how it will be when I grow up. I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and her and her. I shall live as people in novels live and have lived. Which ones I was not sure, only that passion and danger, ecstasy and despair (but then more ecstasy) would be in attendance. However...who said that thing about "the littleness of life that art exaggerates"? There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life.

But time...how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but we were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.”

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

Oh hello, you're alive
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLAAy_pM-k8

While one remains exposed to the action of all sorts of forces they more or less counterbalance each other, so that the general equilibrium, produced by evolution, is on the whole maintained. But if we suppress all but one, its action becomes irresistible. Thus, the pressure of atmosphere would crush us if we "banished" that of our bodies, and we should crumble to dust if we rebelled successfully against cohesion. A man who is normally an "allround good sort" often becomes intolerable when he gets rid of his collection of vices, he is swept into monomania by the spiritual pride which had been previously restrained by countervailing passions. Again, there is a worse draught when a ill-fitting door is closed than when it stands open.

(Aleister Crowley - Magick in theory and practice)

“There’s a banal saying that it is better to light a candle in the dark than to curse the darkness. But it’s probably better to get to know the darkness, to avoid the risk of setting the whole house on fire.” (Tor Ulven)

"...we shall only be delivered from our afflictions by sayings and doing that are altogether irrational, paradoxical, and magical: the wild songs of fairyland, sung to unearthly tones, are the only medicine for the heartache and the headache of humanity."

Arthur Machen - A Note on Ascetism (The Academy, 27th May, 1911)

“The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won't let go of your life: your memories, your attachments. They burn 'em all away. But they're not punishing you,' he said. 'They're freeing your soul. If your frightened of dying, and your holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. If you've made your peace then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth.”
― Bruce Joel Rubin, Jacob's Ladder

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
(Arthur C. Clarke)

"The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe." (Albert Einstein)

"Not all that is luminous is illuminated."

"We all of us fancy that we must have a core at the center, something that is not merely shell. We would like to hold within us some specially dainty kernel, to be a nut protecting the future, the everlasting. And we do not realise, cannot realise, that we have in fact no kernel, but are made up of one leaf on top of another from outermost to innermost, that in fact, we are onions. But in the onion every leaf shares its essential nature. The onion is honest right through, and only becomes dishonest, rotten, if it tries to grow a kernel different from the rest of it, and to destroy the peel as though it were something false, something no honourable onion should acknowledge. Everything in us is a peeling, but in every peeling is the essential nature of the whole. The self is an onion self."

(Georg Groddeck - Exploring the Unconscious)

God is.
Undivided God is pure potentiality and realizes nothing.
God can only realize itself by becoming Many and then experiencing all possibilities through the adventures of its many parts.
The ultimate purpose for My existence is to exhaust My individual potentiality.
My love for God and God´s Love for Me springs from the Great Secret we share.
The secret is God and I will achieve Supreme Enlightenment at the same moment.

(Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford - The Secret of the Shem-Ha-Mephorash)