It’s terribly depressing to discover some quite worthless person blithely reciting a poem that you yourself had particularly liked and carefully copied down in a notebook. –Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book, translated by Meredith McKinney
Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,(I am large, I contain multitudes.) –Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 53 [Soen Nakagawa] had many faces: he was a simple monk, a “crazy wisdom” Zen master,…
Pirkei Avot 4:1–“Ben Zoma states, ‘Who is wise? He who learns from all people. Who is strong? He who controls his passions. Who is rich? He who rejoices in his own lot. Who is honorable?…
For Jim Grote, who introduced me in my late twenties to the work of Rene Girard, whom I am still reading, especially through three recent works by Cynthia L. Haven. Girard’s ideas inspire, humble, energize,…
Method of investigation— as soon as one has arrived at any position, try to find in what sense the contrary is true. –Simone Weil, Waiting for God
There is a story that Po always showed his poems to an uneducated old servant-woman, and anything she couldn’t understand, he rewrote. –David Hinton on Po Chü-i, in The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese…
On ne donne rien si libéralement que ses conseils. –La Rochefoucauld, Maxim #110 One gives nothing so liberally as pieces of advice. –Translation by Stuart D. Warner and Stéphane DouardSt. Augustine’s Press, 2001
All women are mothers and sisters, and all men are fathers and brothers in God’s family.–Maharajji, in Ram Dass, Miracle of Love: Stories about Neem Karoli Baba Oh humanityI am your grateful son.Every man my…
It was in Kafka that Scholem discovered a kind of heretical, secular Kabbalah, a literature paradoxically at once canonical and nihilistic. With Max Brod and Walter Benjamin, Scholem saw in Kafka a deeply Jewish writer,…
For my teacher Marc H. Ellis who gave me apt advice when I nervously started started teaching in 1997: “Don’t worry about what the students give to you. Just give everything you’ve got to your…