“The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no "meaning," they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“We have outsmarted ourselves, like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“Figures dark beneath their loads pass down the far bank of the river, rendered immortal by the streak of sunset upon their shoulders”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“It is related that Sakyamuni [the historical Buddha] once dismissed as of small consequence a feat of levitation on the part of a disciple, and cried out in pity for a yogin by the river who had spent twenty years of his human existence learning to walk on water, when the ferryman might have taken him across for a small coin.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“Indicating his twisted legs without a trace of self-pity or bitterness, as if they belonged to all of us, he casts his arms wide to the sky and the snow mountains, the high sun and dancing sheep, and cries, ’Of course I am happy here! It’s wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!’ In its wholehearted acceptance of what is;I feel as if he had struck me in the chest. Butter tea and wind pictures, the Crystal Mountain, and blue sheep dancing on the snow-it’s quite enough!
Have you seen the snow leopard?
No! Isn’t that wonderful?”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“My foot slips on a narrow ledge; in that split second, as needles of fear pierce heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time. Thought and action are not different, and stone, air, ice, sun, fear, and self are one. What is exhilarating is to extend this acute awareness into ordinary moments, in the moment-by-moment experiencing of the lammergeier and the wolf, which, finding themselves at the center of things, have no need for any secret of true being. In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us…the present moment. The purpose of mediation practice is not enlightenment’ it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“And as the wary dogs skirt past, we nod, grimace, and resume our paths to separate destinies and graves.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“Today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed, things merely change shape or form…the cosmic radiation that is thought to come from the explosion of creation strikes the earth with equal intensity from all directions, which suggests either that the earth is at the center of the universe, as in our innocence we once supposed, or that the known universe has no center.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“The sun is roaring, it fills to bursting each crystal of snow. I flush with feeling, moved beyond my comprehension, and once again, the warm tears freeze upon my face. These rocks and mountains, all this matter, the snow itself, the air- the earth is ringing. All is moving, full of power, full of light.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“I grow into these mountains like a moss. I am bewitched. The blinding snow peaks and the clarion air, the sound of earth and heaven in the silence, the requiem birds, the mythic beasts, the flags, great horns, and old carved stones, the silver ice in the black river, the Kang, the Crystal Mountain. Also, I love the common miracles-the murmur of my friends at evening, the clay fires of smudgy juniper, the coarse dull food, the hardship and simplicity, the contentment of doing one thing at a time… gradually my mind has cleared itself, and wind and sun pour through my head, as through a bell. Though we talk little here, I am never lonely; I am returned into myself. In another life-this isn’t what I know, but how I feel- these mountains were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one’s own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon- the homegoing that needs no home, like that waterfall on the supper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again to the sky.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“To glimpse one’s own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon—the homegoing that needs no home, like that waterfall on the upper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again into the sky.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“In the book of Job, the Lord demands, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?”
“I was there!”-surely that is the answer to God’s question. For no matter how the universe came into being, most of the atoms in these fleeting assemblies that we think of as our bodies have been in existence since the beginning. Each breath we take contains hundreds of thousands of the inert, pervasive argon atoms that were actually breathed in his lifetime by the Buddha, and indeed contain parts of all the ‘snorts, sighs, bellows, shrieks” of all creatures that ever existed or will exist. These atoms flow backward and forward in such useful but artificial constructs as time and space, in the same universal rhythms, universal breath as the tides and stars, joining both the living and the dead in that energy which animates the universe.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“I walk lighter, stumble less, with more spring in leg and lung, keeping my center of gravity deep in the belly, and letting that center 'see.' At these times, I am free of vertigo, even in dangerous places; my feet move naturally to firm footholds, and I flow. But sometimes for a day or more, I lose this feel of things, my breath is high up in my chest, and then I cling to the cliff edge as to life itself. And of course it is this clinging, the tightness of panic, that gets people killed: 'to clutch,' in ancient Egyptian, 'to clutch the mountain,' in Assyrian, were euphemisms that signified 'to die'" (125).”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“The central feature of the practice of meditation and hard work known as Zen is that, as Matthiessen says, it “has no patience with mysticism, far less the occult.” Nor does it have any time with moralism, the prescriptions or distortions we would impose on the world, obscuring it from our view. It asks, it insists rather, that we take this moment for what it is, undistracted, and not cloud it with needless worries of what might have been or fantasies of what might come to be. It is, essentially, a training in the real…”the Universe itself is the scripture of Zen." Pico Iyer from introduction.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. This retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“Left alone, I am overtaken by the northern void-no wind, no cloud, no track, no bird, only the crystal crescents between peaks, the ringing monuments of rock that, freed from the talons of ice and snow, thrust an implacable being into the blue. In the early light, the rock shadows on the snow are sharp; in the tension between light and dark is the power of the universe. This stillness to which all returns, this is reality, and soul and sanity have no more meaning than a gust of snow; such transience and insignificance are exalting, terrifying, all at once…Snow mountains, more than sea or sky, serve as a mirror to one’s own true being, utterly still, utterly clear, a void, an Emptiness without life or sound that carries in Itself all life, all sound.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“And perhaps this is what Tukten knows—that the journey to Dolpo, step by step and day by day, is the Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus, the Tao, the Way, the Path, but no more so than small events of days at home.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“And then there was the small matter of the snow leopard, whose terrible beauty is the very stuff of human longing. Its uncompromising yellow eyes, wired into the depths of its unfathomable spirit, gaze out from the cover of innumerable editions. It is, I think, the animal I would most like to be eaten by.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“Have you seen the snow leopard? No! Isn’t that wonderful?”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“I sit in meditation…and soon all sounds, and all one sees and feels, take on imminence, an immanence, as if the Universe were coming to attention, a Universe of which one is the center, a Universe that is not the same yet not different from oneself: within man as within mountains there are many parts of hydrogen and oxygen, of calcium, phosphorus, potassium, and other elements. ‘You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars…’(Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditation)
The secret of the mountains is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no ‘meaning,’ they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can never be a sculpture. It can be elegant and very beautiful, but it can never be sculpture. Captive to facts - or predetermined form - it cannot fly.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“The Lama of the Crystal Monastery appears to be a very happy man, and yet I wonder how he feels about his isolation in the silences of Tsakang, which he has not left in eight years now and, because of his legs, may never leave again. Since Jang-bu seems uncomfortable with the Lama or with himself or perhaps with us, I tell him not to inquire on this point if it seems to him impertinent, but after a moment Jang-bu does so. And this holy man of great directness and simplicity, big white teeth shining, laughs out loud in an infectious way at Jang-bu’s question. Indicating his twisted legs without a trace of self-pity or bitterness, as if they belonged to all of us, he casts his arms wide to the sky and the snow mountains, the high sun and dancing sheep, and cries, “Of course I am happy here! It’s wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“In his first summers, forsaking all his toys, my son would stand rapt for nearly an hour in his sandbox in the orchard, as doves and redwings came and went on the warm wind, the leaves dancing, the clouds flying…the child was not observing; he was at rest in the very center of the universe, a part of things, unaware of endings and beginning, still in unison with the primordial nature of creation, letting all light and phenomena pour through.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“The mystical perception (which is only “mystical” if reality is limited to what can be measured by the intellect and senses) is remarkably consistent in all ages and all places. All phenomena are processes, connections, all is in flux…have the mind screens knocked away to see there is no real edge to anything, that in the endless interpenetration of the universe, a molecular flow, a cosmic energy shimmers in all stone and steel as well as flesh…”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“Transfixed by the bright gaze of a lizard, I become calm. This stone on which the lizard lies was under the sea when lizards first came into being, and now the flood is wearing it away, to return it once again into the oceans.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“As the hand held before the eye conceals the greatest mountain, so the little earthly life hides from the glance the enormous lights and mysteries of which the world is full, and he who can draw it away from before his eyes, as one draws away a hand, beholds the great shining of the inner worlds. RABBI NACHMANN OF BRATZLAV”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“In the gaunt, brown face in the mirror—unseen since late September—the blue eyes in a monkish skull seem eerily clear, but this is the face of a man I do not know.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
“A child dragging bent useless legs is crawling up the hill outside the village. Nose to the stones, goat dung, and muddy trickles, she pulls herself along like a broken cricket. We falter, ashamed of our strong step, and noticing this, she gazes up, clear-eyed, without resentment—it seems much worse that she is pretty. In Bengal, GS says stiffly, beggars will break their children’s knees to achieve this pitiable effect for business purposes: this is his way of expressing his distress. But the child that lies here at our boots is not a beggar; she is merely a child, staring in curiosity at tall, white strangers. I long to give her something—a new life?—yet am afraid to tamper with such dignity. And so I smile as best I can, and say “Namas-te!” “Good morning!” How absurd! And her voice follows as we go away, a small clear smiling voice—“Namas-te!”—a Sanskrit word for greeting and parting that means, “I salute you”.”
― Peter Matthiessen, quote from The Snow Leopard
Peter Matthiessen
Born place: in New York City, The United States
Born date May 22, 1927
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“Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Life Without Principle
“Derken, müritlerden biri "Yalnızım Üstat," dedi, "saatlerin nalları göğsümü ezip duruyor."
El Mustafa ayağa kalktı ve ortalarında durdu; şiddetli bir rüzgârın sesine benzeyen bir sesle konuştu: "Yalnız! Ne var ki bunda? Yalnız geldin ve yalnız kaybolacaksın sis içinde.
İç öyleyse kadehinden yalnız ve sessizce. Güz günleri başka dudaklara başka kadehler verdi, acı ve tatlı şarap doldurdu kadehlerine, tıpkı senin kadehini doldurduğu gibi.
İç şarabını yalnız, kanının ve gözyaşlarının tadında olsa da; sana susuzluğu bağışladığı için hayata şükret. Çünkü susuzluk olmasa, yüreğin kurumuş bir denizin kıyısı olurdu ancak, şarkıdan ve meddücezirden yoksun.
İç şarabını yalnız, cezbe ve çoşkuyla iç!
Yukarı, başının üstüne kaldır kadehini, sonuna kadar, senin gibi yalnız içenlerin şerefine iç!
Bir gün, insanlarla arkadaşlığı aradım ve onların şölen sofralarına oturdum, yavaş yavaş içtim onlarla; ama şarapları başımı döndürmedi, bağrımı da yakmadı. Sadece ayaklarıma indi. Bilgeliğim susuz, kalbim kilitli ve mühürlü kaldı. Yalnız ayaklarım onların bulanık fikirleriyle arkadaş oldu.
Ve başka insanların arkadaşlığını aradım bir daha, ne de sofralarında onlarla şarap içtim.
Bunun için sana diyorum, saatlerin nalları göğsünü ezip dursa da, ne önemi var! Hüznünün kadehinden yalnız içmen iyidir, neşenin kadehinden de yalnız içeceksin.”
― Kahlil Gibran, quote from The Garden of The Prophet
“The best engineer in the world can’t build a 10-story sandcastle.”
― quote from The Little Book That Builds Wealth: The Knockout Formula for Finding Great Investments
“God has never promised a life without suffering, but He has promised to comfort us and give us the strength to carry on. He has also promised to work good out of everything that happens to us if we love Him and continue wanting His will in our lives (Rom. 8:28).”
― Joyce Meyer, quote from Do Yourself a Favor...Forgive: Learn How to Take Control of Your Life Through Forgiveness
“He doesn’t hate you, Thomas, he admires you. And we’re often frightened and jealous of what we admire.”
― Tom Piccirilli, quote from A Choir of Ill Children
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Finger Lickin' Fifte...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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