“I am afraid love is not really the experience of beauty and romantic joy alone. Love is associated with ugliness and pain and aggression, as well as with the beauty of the world; it is not the recreation of heaven. Love or compassion, the open path, is associated with what is.”

— Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

“I’ve been thinking about God. God must be very, very, very big… and God must be very, very, very tiny. God has to be very tiny because God has to fit inside me, right in the middle. And I am a very small boy.”

— Russell, age 3, quoted in Christina Grof, The Thirst for Wholeness

“Awakening does not eliminate suffering, but it does change our relationship to it.”

— John Welwood, Love and Awakening

“If you want to become whole, let yourself be partial. If you want to become straight, let yourself be crooked. If you want to become full, let yourself be empty.”

— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“We do not desire because we are lacking; we desire because we are connected.”

— Marc Gafni, The Mystery of Love

“The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.”

— Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

“The dragon is not slain or fought against, but drawn out and fearlessly nurtured. In this way, the split between good and evil begins to soften, and the enemy can become an ally. The energy once bound up in struggle becomes a positive, even protective force.”

— Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons

“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure, and while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains to destroy us. Every Angel is terrifying.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, The First Elegy

“To try to talk about the unsayable to the crowds is to trivialize it, or even to lose its depth, like describing great lovemaking to an outsider.”

— Richard Rohr, The Naked Now