Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.

Music can also be a sensual pleasure, like eating food or sex. But its highest vibration for me is that point of taking us to a real understanding of something in our nature which we can very rarely get at. It is a spiritual state of oneness.

I really think that's what music and art is about. It's another way to connect to the divine. It's a real pure way of touching that deeper reality beneath our life.

The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.

Awakening your spiritual side is really what artists do. When you hit a groove, it's not you; it's the spirit world.

I've felt since I was a kid this desperate longing to be closer to - I don't know what. Just to something bigger, to be in conversation with the mystery of everything.

People everywhere see the True, the Beautiful, and the Good and long to know their source. And, thank God, He has revealed Himself!

My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before,—a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.

I touch God in my songas the hill touched the far-away seawith its waterfall.

I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things. The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature this is what I am looking for. It is absolutely necessary for me to find it somewhere.

Everyone is possessed with an irresistible desire to know his relationship to the Infinite.

In this light my spirit suddenly saw through all, and in and by all creatures, even in herbs and grass it knew God, who he is, and how he is, and what his will is: And suddenly in that light my will was set on by a mighty impulse, to describe the being of God.

Sincere desire and worthiness invite the spirit of revelation into our lives.

The highest condition of the religious sentiment is when. . . the worshiper not only sees God everywhere, but sees nothing which is not full of God.

The foot of the heavenly ladder, which we have got to mount in order to reach the higher regions, has to be fixed firmly in every-day life, so that everybody may be able to climb up it along with us. When people then find that they have got climbed up higher and higher into a marvelous, magical world, they will feel that that realm, too, belongs to their ordinary, every-day life, and is, merely, the wonderful and most glorious part thereof.

Oh, to know God's private address.

When you dance, do you feel desire? Do you feel as if you were summoning up a greater energy? When you dance, are there moments when you cease to be yourself?

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death.

My hand is entirely the implement of a distant sphere. It is not my head that functions but something else, something higher, something somewhere remote. I must have great friends there, dark as well as bright. They are all very kind to me.

My desire is that my Lord would give me broader and deeper thoughts, to feed myself with wondering at His love.

The thing we long for, that we are For one transcendent moment.

With each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and expires its air. It converses with truths that have always been spoken in the world, and becomes conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno and Arrian, than with persons in the house.

When we pray for death we really desire a fuller life.

A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.