Robert N. Bellah Quotes

Nothing to do with anything, something to do with everything.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.

Hard distinctions make bad philosophy.

Ignorant people see life as either existence or non-existence, but wise men see it beyond both existence and non-existence to something that transcends them both; this is an observation of the Middle Way.

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.

The soul is neither inside nor outside the body; neither proximate to nor separate from it.

My perspective on life is now to try to play music that reflects that life and death are part of the same coin. And to know about life, we must really examine the function - like death. Life tells you a lot about what death is, not what people say it is.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

I'm fascinated by the yin and yang of everything.

The problem of a painting is physical and metaphysical, the same as I think life is physical and metaphysical.

To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.

The more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange, the more you become aware of the universal and infinite.

From out of all the many particulars comes oneness, and out of oneness come all the many particulars.

Good and evil go hand in hand, you can't seperate them.

And if life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life.

Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery -- the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets -- is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.

Good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine.

The late British-born philosopher Alan Watts, in one of his wonderful lectures on eastern philosophy, used this analogy: "If I draw a circle, most people, when asked what I have drawn, will say I have drawn a circle or a disc, or a ball. Very few people will say I've drawn a hole in the wall, because most people think of the inside first, rather than thinking of the outside. But actually these two sides go together--you cannot have what is 'in here' unless you have what is out there.' " In other words, where we are is vital to who we are.

It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness ... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself ... both and one. A shadow on snow.

Death and life are the same thing-like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same...They can be neither separated, nor mixed.

The problem is that we have allowed our egos, the part of us which believes that we are separate from God and separate from each other, to dominate our lives.

Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.

I have inside me the winds, the deserts, the oceans, the stars, and everything created in the universe. We were all made by the same hand, and we have the same soul.