Thomas Hardy Quotes

Music has brought me some of the highest moments of my life. I don't even hear the music. I don't even hear the notes. I'm not aware that someone has turned on a tape machine - I'm in another world.

I want to be taken out of our material world and experience something that is in another dimension.

I'm a seeker of transcendence through music, and that's kind of where I'm at with the live shows - wanting to help people get out of their heads a little bit.

The place we go as a band is a sort of samadhi, intensely emotional and not bound by self-thinking. And lyrically, one of the goals is to suggest that something is going on beyond what you can see.

Music has always taken me to another plane of existence.

It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done, 1,000 nights before, but everything would align. And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely human. He would be lit from within, and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity. And when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by it's name. They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, "Allah, Allah, Allah, God God, God." That's God, you know.

In my films, I hope there are a few moments where you feel almost illuminated, like in a state of ecstasy, stepping out of yourself, beyond yourself and perceiving something which is only, in the case of cinema, possible in collective dreams.

There are different points of view about how to approach this experience of ultimate ecstasy, as some people describe it, or ultimate nirvana or ultimate fulfillment.

At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.

It's very important to transcend places that hold us.

To work magic is to weave the unseen forces into form; to soar beyond sight; to explore the uncharted dream realm of the hidden reality.

Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still-are.

The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.

Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live.

I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.

I am living permanently in my dream, from which I make brief forays into reality.

In community, where you have all the affection you could ever dream of, you feel that there is a place where even community cannot reach. That's a very important experience. In that loneliness, which is like a dark night of the soul, you learn that God is greater than community.

I am in the Aleph, the point at which everything is in the same place at the same time. I'm at a window, looking out at the world and its secret places, poetry lost in time and words left hanging in space...sentences that are perfectly understood, even when left unspoken. Feelings that simultaneously exalt and suffocate.

In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.

Do dead man dream? The dead themselves are silent on the matter

...(I)ndividual selfhood is expressed in the self's capacity for self-transcendence and not in its rational capacity for conceptual and analytic procedures.

True dreams and visions should be as visible to the artist as the phenomena of the objective world.

Life is a dream from which we all must wake before we can dream again.

Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths. By finding your own dream and following it through, it will lead you to the myth-world in which you live. But just as in dream, the subject and object, though they seem to be separate, are really the same.

The only reward the musician receives is music: the privilege of standing in the presence of music when it leans over and takes us into its confidence. As it is for the audience. In this moment everything else is irrelevant and without power. For those in music, this is the moment when life becomes real.