J. D. Salinger Quotes

The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion.

I'm spiritual.

Art is the path to being spiritual.

We take people to the threshold of religion. Our aim is to induce immediate experience that is beyond the odd, beyond the strange, and beyond the weird. It verges on the wholly other.

I have an awareness of a spiritual realm, and I see signs that I feel speak to me - I don't know if that falls into superstition.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.

It is not good to talk about Zen, because Zen is nothingness... If you talk about it, you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it, no one knows it is there.

So often, religion is identified in terms coined by Christianity as sets of belief. But I had the sense that it not only involves practice, but also emotion and levels of our experience that are almost precognitive.

Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.

Today we are searching for things in nature that are hidden behind the veil of appearance... We look for and paint this inner, spiritual side of nature.

Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.

I've never been a materialist; I've never been somebody who believes in only what we can see and measure. I continue to be a student of religious philosophy, and I continue to take those ideas very seriously.

I think people hear the words 'transcendental meditation' and 'paganism,' and that's almost worse because it's real. Those are real things. Those are absolute energies. Satanism is like Halloween. Transcendental meditation and having a realization of how we really are - whether we want to be or not - we live in a pagan culture.

I dream like a shaman.

It's all about sensitivity. If you have sensitivity then mysticism will be part of your life.

I can't help but view the world mystically. It's how I see it. I'm not a strict materialist. I think there's much more to the world than what we see with our five senses.

Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.

I'm actually very spiritual.

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least.

Everything I do, I do it for somebody I've never met before, something in the great beyond. That's my primary relationship, really, is with something divine. I feel a connection as real with that as I've ever had with anybody on this earth.

The highest cannot be spoken; it can only be acted.

It is possible to transcend the usual limitations of the body, ego, space, and linear time.

Only when all images of Earth are hushed and the clamor of the senses be stilled, and the soul has passed beyond thought of self, can the eternal wisdom be revealed to the mystic who seeks that highest communion with the unseen.

Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.