William Winwood Reade Quotes

We are not angels, we are merely sophisticated apes. Yet we feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, craving transcendence and all the time trying to spread our wings and fly off, and it's really a very odd predicament to be in, if you think about it.

Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges.

Your history is animal. Your future is divinity. Right now, you are like a pendulum, swinging between the two.

The Breath becomes a stone; the stone, a plant; the plant, an animal; the animal, a man; the man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.

We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.

We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost.

For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man...Some day a man will walk into my office as a ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher.

Turn away from your animal kind, try to leave your body, just to live in your mind.

Like the ocean is your god-self; It remains for ever undefiled. And like the ether it lifts but the winged. Even like the sun is your god-self; It knows not the ways of the mole nor seeks it the holes of the serpent. But your god-self does not dwell alone in your being. Much in you is still man, and much in you is not yet man, But a shapeless pigmy that walks asleep in the mist searching for its own awakening.

You know things are moving. You're changing, you fellow Dead are changing, the world is ready for something miraculous. What are we waiting for?

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.

If we're so smart and so much better than all the animals, and man rules the world, why can't we just change all the time from, like, a caterpillar to a butterfly?

To have attained to the human form is a source of joy... What an incomparable bliss it is to undergo these countless transitions.

From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows.

The Caterpillar cannot understand the butterfly

Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation

We began as mineral. We emerged into plant life, and into the animal state, and then into being human, and always we have forgotten our former states, except in early spring when we slightly recall being green again.

On the one hand, man is a body, in the same way that this may be said of every other animal organism. On the other hand, man has a body. That is, man experiences himself as an entity that is not identical with his body, but that, on the contrary, has that body at its disposal. In other words, man's experience of himself always hovers in a balance between being and having a body, a balance that must be redressed again and again.

You can't will something into being. If you follow that philosophy all the way, to will something into being, that's animal style. That's what man does. But if you're looking at the philosophy correctly, and I never did - I like to think I did sometimes - you have to do it without ego, without the I. You have to separate yourself.

You do not have to struggle to reach God, but you do have to struggle to tear away the self-created veil that hides him from you

There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.

If every life is a river, then it's little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face. My name once meant daughter, grandaughter, friend, sister, beloved. Now those words mean only what their letters spell out; Star in the night sky. Truth in the darkness. I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I'd be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.

How he lies in his rights of a man! Death has done all death can. And absorbed in the new life he leads, He recks not, he heeds Nor his wrong nor my vengeance; both strike On his senses alike, And are lost in the solemn and strange Surprise of the change.

Whenever anything changes and quits its proper limits, this change is at once the death of that which was before.