The following are more quotes taken from the Loy book. I have yet to right a proper review of it, and I plan to do so. But I find the quotes intriguing as stand alone thought starters. Anyway, for your casual consideration:
Without a foundation in conventional truth,
The significance of the ultimate truth cannot be taught.
Without understanding the significance of the ultimate truth,
Liberation is not achieved.
--Nagarjuna
The literary language of the New Testament is not intended, like literature itself, simply to suspend judgment, but to convey a vision of spiritual life that continues to transform and expand our own. That is myths become, as purely literary myths cannot, myths to live by; its metaphors become, as purely literary metaphors cannot, metaphors to live in.
--Northrup Frye
Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
--Simone Weil
Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.
--Nicholas Malebranche
Let your mind come forth without fixing it anywhere.
--Diamond Sutra
There is no specifiable difference whatever
between nirvana and samsara.
The limit of nirvana is the limit of samsara.
There is not even the subtlest difference between the two.
--Nagarjuna
We make stories because we are story.
--Russell Hoban
The reality of cosmos becomes a story to be told by the man who participates responsively in the story told by the god.
--Eric Voegelin
The eye I see God with is the eye God sees me with; my and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing and one love.
--Meister Eckhart
The soul’s vision of its divine Lord is the vision which He has of the soul.
--Ibn ‘Arabi
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the superman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.
--Nietzsche
Literature is the Imaginal in script.
--Northrup Frye
“I feel as if I was inside a song, if you get my meaning.”
--Sam Gamgee, in The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkein
The East emphasizes liberation from the human condition, while the Western spiritual traditions place special value on the human incarnation in its own right, and are more interesting in fulfilling the meaning of this incarnation than in going beyond it or in finding release from it . . . to bring these two together is an important evolutionary step.
--John Welwood
