“[Mysticism] requires to be embodied in some degree in history, dogma and institutions if it is to reach the sense-conditioned human mind. [… T]he antithesis between the religions of ‘authority’ and of ‘spirit,’ the ‘Church’ and the ‘mystic,’ is false. Each requires the other.”

“The strongest wish of a vast number of earnest men and women to-day is for a basis of religious belief which shall rest, not upon tradition or external authority or historical evidence, but upon the ascertainable facts of human experience. The craving for immediacy which we have seen to be characteristic of all mysticism, now takes the form of a desire to establish the validity of the God-consciousness as a normal part of the healthy inner life.”

“[Mysticism seems] to gather together under one heading the strongly-felt beliefs of the churchgoer, the emotions felt by sensitive souls in the presence of sublime natural beauty, vivid and passionate faith, and the mystic states of such diverse persons as St. Plotinus, Francis of Assisi, [Percy Bysshe] Shelley, [William] Blake and St. John of the Cross.”

“These, if the cult

grows strong, need hope and hope is only given

by the men of rule for their purpose, and so

it will be with your sibyls, baals, the lord

of the gibbet who would free the world.

Let them plant his signum where they choose —

let the empire acclaim him Rex, let Caesar

be the vicar of a Syrian mathematici, let

Roman Jove go hang, call the Great Mother

by some other name — what’s the odds?

The men of rule know all about such

trifles and how to accommodate, if needs

must”

“You say I am repeating

Something I have said before. I shall say it again.

Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not”

“the sun and the seasons changed,

and as the flower-leaves that drift

from a tree were the numberless

tender kisses, the soft caresses,

given and received; none of these

came into the story”

“God is realized most directly in seclusion and quiet [….] Looking back upon the old days it seems, indeed, strange to many of us now that we should have come to rely so exclusively as we did upon organisations, clubs, missions, – upon everything in short that is not quiet – for the deepening and extending of our Christian faith and life.”