Top 100 Quotes About Transcendence
#1. We live in a world of breathtaking material plenty. That has freed hundreds of millions of people from day-to-day struggles and liberated us to pursue more significant desires: purpose, transcendence, and spiritual fulfillment.
Daniel H. Pink
#2. Contradiction is the lever of transcendence.
Simone Weil
#3. Transcendence implies the surpassing of two things, and the consequent attainment of a third thing. But there are no 'things' in reality, of any kind whatever: there is only the thing-in-itself, its suchness, which is Reality, revealed when the illusory dualism of inexistent qualities is dissolved.
Wei Wu Wei
#4. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.
Aldous Huxley
#5. Sex has the unparalleled power to make us absurd to ourselves. It also has the power to make us understand transcendence.
Erica Jong
#6. In True Meditation, we're in the body as a means to transcend it. It is paradoxical that the greatest doorway to the transcendence of form is through form itself.
Adyashanti
#7. My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.
Susan Sontag
#8. At its strongest and wildest and most authentic, love is a demon. It is a religion, a high-risk adventure, an act of heroism. Love is ecstasy and injury, transcendence and danger, altruism and excess. In many ways, it is a divine madness.
Cristina Nehring
#9. The holiness of the real
Is always there, accessible
In total immanence. The nodes
Of transcendence coagulate
In you, the experiencer,
And in the other, the lover.
Kenneth Rexroth
#10. The question of God, by contrast, is one that can and must be pursued in terms of the absolute and the contingent, the necessary and the fortuitous, potency and act, possibility and impossibility, being and nonbeing, transcendence and immanence.
David Bentley Hart
#11. The reader is always looking for two things in the novel: themselves and transcendence.
Walter Mosley
#12. Only the human heart can live in present moment awareness. The human mind cannot, because its essential nature is to ponder the past and plan the future. This is why all wise beings encourage us to go beyond the mind into the timeless, boundless transcendence of heart-centered awareness.
David Simon
#13. Many people who come to spiritual practice are frightened by their feelings. They hope meditation will help them to transcend the messiness of the world and leave them invulnerable to difficult feelings. But this is a false transcendence, a denial of life. It is fear masquerading as wisdom.
Jack Kornfield
#14. Wabi means spare, impoverished; simple and functional. It connotes a transcendence of fad and fashion. The spirit of wabi imbues all the Zen arts, from calligraphy to karate, from the tea ceremony to Zen archery.
Shunryu Suzuki
#15. During those rare moments of creativeness, when a person has something in common with the making of the universe, he feels a sense of transcendence. What could be a greater reward?
Joseph C Zinker
#16. Through transcendence of duality, we foster greater unity in our lives, which brings about inner peace and the sprouting of unconditional LOVE.
Alaric Hutchinson
#17. Genuine transcendence doesn't just look away from human suffering and say, "I am at peace, so I'm at the mountaintop." Genuine transcendence looks human suffering in the eye and attains peace because of a faith in things unseen.
Marianne Williamson
#18. So strong was the preconception of absolute space and time in the scientific mentality of those days, that Lorentz did not realize the grand transcendence of what he had discovered, and contented himself with remodeling the edifice of Physics
instead of rebuilding it with a new foundation.
Felix Alba-Juez
#19. Our spiritual mission is not to ignore the darkness, but to bring light TO the darkness. Ignoring darkness does not dispel it; only the light does. That is the difference between denial and transcendence.
Marianne Williamson
#20. But art and religion will always shadow one another through the abstract nouns they both invoke: truth, seriousness, imagination, sympathy, morality, transcendence.
Julian Barnes
#21. For the uniqueness of man lies in his capacity for self-transcendence.
Ruth Nanda Anshen
#22. Well, the idea of God as a supreme being means that he is simply like us, writ large, and just bigger and better, the end product of the series; whereas this divine personality that we meet in the Bible was, for centuries, regarded simply as a symbol of a greater transcendence that lay beyond it.
Karen Armstrong
#23. He liked his transcendence out in plain sight where he could keep an eye on it
say, in a nice stained-glass window
not woven through the fabric of life like gold threads through a brocade.
Neal Stephenson
#24. Art's a very metaphysical activity. It's something that enriches the parameters of your life, the possibilities of being, and you touch transcendence and you change your life. And you want to change the life of others, too. That's why people are involved with art.
Jeff Koons
#25. Little by little a planetary prayer book is thus being composed by an increasingly united humanity seeking its oneness. Once again, but this time on a universal scale, humankind is seeking no less than its reunion with 'divine,' its transcendence into higher forms of life.
Robert Muller
#26. God, unity, meaning, transcendence all belong to the imagination.
Marty Rubin
#27. Over and over in the butterfly we see the idea of transcendence. In the forest we see not the inert but the aspiring. In water that departs forever and forever returns, we experience eternity.
Mary Oliver
#28. You might have thought that a world such as ours, so hard-nosed and cynical and brash, would have very little time for transcendence, spiritual values of goodness and compassion, gentleness, and caring, but we actually do experience them.
Desmond Tutu
#29. The Yoga of the Dream State has always held to be one of the fastest, most efficient ways of reaching a plateau experience of subtle and causal realms, thus quickly opening the door to stable adaptation at - and transcendence of - those realms.
Ken Wilber
#30. What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim 'You know exactly what I mean!' depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.
Will Self
#31. And so man, as existing transcendence abounding in and surpassing toward possibilities, is a creature of distance. Only through the primordial distances he establishes toward all being in his transcendence does a true nearness to things flourish in him.
Martin Heidegger
#32. Doing what others have done is skill.
Dong what few have done is talent.
Doing what none have done is genius.
Going where others have gone is competence.
Going where few have gone is excellence.
Going where none have gone is transcendence.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#33. In moments of transcendence, when time stands still, your biological clock will stop. The spirit is that domain of our awareness where there is no time.
Deepak Chopra
#34. Ultimately, I want to prepare food that will be recognized equally in Tokyo, London, and Paris. I am after that universality, that transcendence.
Charlie Trotter
#35. The most transformative experiences people have - bliss, devotion, self transcendence - are currently anchored to the worst parts of culture and to ways of thinking that merely amplify superstition, self-deception, and conflict.
Sam Harris
#36. In Sufi terms, there are two very interesting notions of transcendence. One is to gaze out at the universe and to comprehend that what you see out there reflects what you are. The other one is to look inside yourself and recognise that the universe is present there.
Mohsin Hamid
#37. Transcendence gets you beyond ego. If you go beyond ego, you see all of this in a more decent perspective and you can start to put all the pieces together. We haven't done that yet. Not as a civilization.
Edgar Mitchell
#38. A total acceptance of yourself brings about a total transcendence of yourself.
Adyashanti
#39. Each new day beckons you to walk on the road of self-transcendence. We transcend ourselves, we do not compete with others. We compete only with our previous achievements, and we get joy. Life is nothing but a perpetual possibility.
Sri Chinmoy
#40. Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.
John Updike
#42. Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.
Chuck Close
#43. When the eternal and the human meet, that's where love is born
not through escaping our humanity or trying to disappear into transcendence, but through finding that place where they come into union.
Adyashanti
#44. Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
Faded credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.
John Updike
#45. Religious ideas and practices take root not because they are promoted by forceful theologians, nor because they can be shown to have a sound historical or rational basis, but because they are found in practice to give the faithful a sense of sacred transcendence.
Karen Armstrong
#46. Wit and playfulness represent a desperately serious transcendence of evil. Humor is both a form of wisdom and a means of survival.
Tom Robbins
#48. Art, in the sense of fine art, often is a kind of religion in our age, because it appears as a means of transcending society at a time when other means of such transcendence are no longer available for many people, particularly the educated.
George Parkin Grant
#49. He (Lincoln) recognized the delicate balance between immanence and transcendence, refusing to settle for either of these alone. His was a God who was both in the world and above the world.
Elton Trueblood
#50. Death is the transcendence of life to a new level to begin an endless eternal life.
Debasish Mridha
#51. To recognize one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.
Eckhart Tolle
#52. Two great appetites of the soul - the urge to independence and self-determination and the urge to self-transcendence - were fused with, and interpreted in the light of, a third - the urge to worship
Aldous Huxley
#53. The only driver for his work was desire, a kind of hunger for reality, for presence, and also for intimacy, as opposed to publicity. In a very wide sense, he was interested in transcendence.
Peter Stamm
#54. Disassociating, mindfulness, transcendence-whatever the label-it's a sort of loophole in our contract with reality, a form of self-rescue.
Diane Ackerman
#55. Transcending the world does not mean to withdraw from the world, to no longer take action, or to stop interacting with people. Transcendence of the world is to act and to interact without any self-seeking.
Eckhart Tolle
#56. Pinot Noir country. My grape. The one varietal that truly enchants me, both stills and steals my heart with its elusive loveliness and false promises of transcendence. I loved her, and I would continue to follow her siren call until my wallet--or liver, whichever came first--gave out.
Rex Pickett
#57. Josh Hanagarne has an astonishing story to tell, and he does so with insight, humor, grace, and wonder. All human beings suffer and struggle. Through the lens of his own miraculous experiences, Mr. Hanagarne illuminates the path to joy and the infinite possibilities of transcendence.
Melanie Rae Thon
#58. Scott Fitzgerald said famously that 'he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for.' But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness or even the possibility of transcendence.
Antonio Damasio
#59. The path to transcendence is unrecognized by many because it appears ordinary.
Bryant McGill
#60. My search is always to find ways to chronicle, to share and to document stories about people, just everyday people. Stories that offer transformation, that lean into transcendence, but that are never sentimental, that never look away from the darkest things about us.
Chris Abani
#61. How am I to put this together with my human life, my intellectual life, my solitude, my transcendence, my brains, and my fearful, fearful ambition?
Joanna Russ
#62. It is only when we understand the transcendence of God that we see how amazing his immanence is, and what a huge privilege it is to be able to enjoy God's intimate friendship.
Nicky Gumbel
#63. So there's only transcendence in the moment. Nobody can be transcended forever. That's why I say, "Who cares if you're enlightened forever?"
Byron Katie
#64. Eucharistic worship is not so much worship of the inaccessible transcendence as worship of the divine condescension, and it is also the merciful and redeeming transformation of the world in the human heart
Pope John Paul II
#65. The mountains are intimations of transcendence, which he is now free to pursue, and the walking writes messages in every cell of his body, telling him that he is not locked inside a cement box, nor in a water drum, but is moving forward.
Michael D. O'Brien
#66. Your mind has great power;
tap into its brilliance.
Your heart has marvellous power;
tap into its excellence.
Your soul has divine power;
tap into its transcendence.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#67. Upon entering into the divine domain of transcendence, all these religious founders truly felt that they had accessed the true meaning of the universe, while in reality, what they had access to, in that state of mind, was their inner self.
Abhijit Naskar
#68. I'm interested in taking hold of the dull truth narrative and finding inside it the transcendence and spirituality and hysteria normally associated with religion.
Jim Crace
#69. Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self's actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward.
Viktor E. Frankl
#70. To feel that you are the Buddha of all times and places and that in some way the salvation of anyone, including yourself, depends upon you, I think there's a lot of ego involved in such a view, not much self-transcendence.
Frederick Lenz
#71. We keep thinking of deity as a kind of fact, somewhere; God as a fact. God is simply our own notion of something that is symbolic of transcendence and mystery. The mystery is what's important.
Joseph Campbell
#72. The whole dimension of religious belief requires transcendence, it requires going beyond what you can establish rationally.
George Coyne
#73. Among the mysteries of the creative ego is how the transcendence of what artists do is their own response to the darkness of who they are, and the same personal darkness that is at odds with the art is what propels artists to the light of what they create.
Steve Erickson
#74. Contemporary philosopher Max More describes the goal of humanity as a transcendence to be achieved through science and technology steered by human values.
Ray Kurzweil
#75. Transcendence is something between a metaphor and a miracle.
Mason Cooley
#76. Scholars of religion refer to the current metamorphosis in religiousness with phrases like the "move to horizontal transcendence" or the "turn to the immanent." But it would be more accurate to think of it as the rediscovery of the sacred in the immanent, the spiritual within the secular.
Harvey Cox
#77. But what about love, compassion, moral goodness, and self-transcendence? Many people still imagine that religion is the true repository of these virtues. To change this, we must talk about the full range of human experience in a way that is as free of dogma as the best science already is.
Sam Harris
#78. Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept.
Karen Armstrong
#79. The propensity to intellectualize is itself both essential and dangerous. I think in our modern world we are much more aware of its essential character than of its dangers, and that is why I think of it as being an expression of transcendence.
Talal Asad
#81. Before annihilation comes an exile from Nature, and then only through wonder and transcendence, the Ghetto rabbi taught, may one combat the psychic disintegration of everyday life.
Diane Ackerman
#82. Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs.
Terry Pratchett
#83. The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence.
Jean Baudrillard
#84. This is what I think. Addiction is just a way of trying to get at something else. Something bigger. Call it transcendence if you want, but it's a fucked-up way, like a rat in a maze. We all want the same thing. We all have this hole. The thing you want offers relief, but it's a trap.
Tess Callahan
#85. Beautiful lips display eloquence.
Beautiful ears display patience.
Beautiful hands display excellence.
Beautiful minds display intelligence.
Beautiful hearts display kindness.
Beautiful souls display transcendence.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#86. The family's function is to repress Eros; to induce a false consciousness of security; to deny death by avoiding life; to cut off transcendence; to believe in God, not to experience the Void; to create, in short, one-dimensional man; to promote respect, conformity, obedience. . .
R.D. Laing
#87. A movie like 'Transcendence' may be pertinent in its political reverberations of all computer data held in a cloud and monitored by the NSA, but it also rails against the tools its makers so artfully employ.
Richard Corliss
#88. The most striking feature of contemporary culture is the unslaked craving for transcendence.
Andrew Delbanco
#89. 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.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
#90. I have spent most of my life (like most people) avoiding transcendence at all costs, mainly because the shit hurts.
Steve Earle
#91. There is no sense of loss in this transcendence of the quest to satisfy desires that previously seemed so important or of the pleasures that came from their satisfaction, for enlightenment involves detachment from one's desires.
Peter Singer
#92. To mature is in part to realize that while complete intimacy and omniscience and power cannot be had, self-transcendence, growth, and closeness to others are nevertheless within one's reach.
Sissela Bok
#93. I shall risk nothing on an attempt to prove the transcendence of p. If others undertake this enterprise, no one will be happier than I in their success. But believe me, it will not fail to cost them some effort.
Charles Hermite
#94. Accept the responsibility of being yourself as you are, with all that is good and with all that is bad, with all that is beautiful and that which is not beautiful. In that acceptance a transcendence happens and one becomes free.
Rajneesh
#95. The first function of mythology is showing everything as a metaphor to transcendence.
Joseph Campbell
#96. Vocabulary for aggravation is large. Vocabulary for transcendence is elusive.
Jennifer Senior
#97. It seems to me that one of the most basic human experiences, one that is genuinely universal and unites-or, more precisely, could unite-all of humanity, is the experience of transcendence in the broadest sense of the word.
Vaclav Havel
#98. Heroes are important not only because they symbolize what we believe to be important, but because they also convey universal truths about personal self-discovery and self-transcendence, one's role in society, and the relation between the two.
Alan Hirsch
#99. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is 'nothing' out there; in making these assertions, their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God's transcendence.
Karen Armstrong
#100. What good your beautiful proof on the transcendence of Pi: Why investigate such problems, given that irrational numbers do not even exist?
Leopold Kronecker