Our spiritual traditions have carried virtues across time. They are tools for the art of living. They are pieces of intelligence about human behavior that neuroscience is now exploring with new words and images: what we practice, we become. What’s true of playing the piano or throwing a ball also holds for our capacity to move through the world mindlessly and destructively or generously and gracefully. I’ve come to think of virtues and rituals as spiritual technologies for being our best selves in flesh and blood, in time and space. There are superstar virtues that come most readily to mind and can be the work of a day or a lifetime– love, compassion, forgiveness. And there are gentle shifts of mind and habit that make those possible, working patiently through the raw materials of our lives.
-Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
Though ever again men may claim to have found truth and to possess her, truth herself remains untouched; truth is the mystery of life which the hand of man can never reach. Truth never descends to our world of error, he who would know must ascend towards that world of Reality where he can see face to face and, for a while, become living truth. But it is every man who must climb the mountain of reality, the Vision on the Mount does not descend into the valley. This it is possible for man to know the mystery of life; solve it he never can, still less contain it in an intellectual system, however logical. Life is not logical, though logic is the alphabet which we must learn if we would speak the language of life, which is truth. And yet no intelligible language can tell of the vision to him who has not seen it; each must tread the weary path up the mountainside by himself and reach the bare and lonely top where alone the vision can be seen. We may point out the path, tell of the hardships on the way, the dangers to be avoided and the obstacles to overcome, but none may tell the final mystery– its name is Experience.
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, it is a reality to be experienced.
Jacobus Johannes Leeuw
“Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful. Beauty is God’s handwriting—a way-side sacrament; welcome it in every fair face, every fair sky, every fair flower, and thank Him for it, who is the Fountain of all loveliness, and drink it in simply and earnestly with all your eyes; it is a charmed draught, a cup of blessing.”
Charles Kingsley