Poems List

In the midst of excitement, grief, joy, and solitude, I remind myself every moment that the sole mission of my life is to find "the ultimate questioner" - that unimaginable who has put me in this madness to answer an unanswerable question.

As a spider emits and draws in its thread, As plants arise on the earth, As the hairs of the head and body from a living person, So from The Eternal arises everything here.

You can rot here without feeling it.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

History is an orphan. It can speak, but cannot hear. It can give, but cannot take. Its wounds and tragedies can be read and known, but cannot be avoided or cured.

You are what your deep driving desire is As your deep driving desire is, so is your will As your will is so is your deed As your deed is so is your destiny.

Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

Here is an artificial city which has been pumped up under forced draught, inflated like a balloon, stuffed with rural humanity like a goose with corn...endeavoring to eat up this too rapid avalanche of anthropoids, the sunshine metropolis heaves and strains, sweats and becomes pop-eyed, like a young boa constrictor trying to swallow a goat. It has never imparted an urban character to its incoming population for the simple reason that it has never had any character to impart. On the other hand, the place has the manners, culture and general outlook of a huge country village.

The world is a garden of philosophy. God is its gardener; Man is the visitor. And any tree that does not bear fruits of philosophy either does not belong to that garden or is yet to be grown.

The honey from the flowers of the senses, Ever present within, ruler of time, Goes beyond fear. For this Self is Supreme

Los Angeles, it should be understood, is not a mere city. On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes and mouth wash.

If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One... I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds.

The world is truly beautiful solely in the eyes of a true philosopher.

When the mind is silent, beyond weakness or non concentration, then it can enter into a world which is far beyond the mind the highest End.

The man for whom law exists - the man of forms, the Conservative, is a tame man.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines.

The wise should surrender speech in mind, mind in the knowing self, the knowing self in the Spirit of the universe, and the Spirit of the universe in the Spirit of peace.

I know what the world exists for, but I know not how it came into existence. I see the design, but not the designer. I understand the question, but not the questioner.

What is conservativism? Is it not the aherence to the old and tried against the new and untried?

Through and through the world is infested with quantity. To talk sense is to talk quantities, It is no use saying the nation is large- how large? It is no use s aying that radium is scarce- how scarce? You can not evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.

One's own thought is one's world. What a person thinks is what he becomes.

God is a philosophical black hole - the point where reason breaks down.

For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.

The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.