Interpretations of Poetry and Religion http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc2.ark:/13960/t3028sf4m?urlappend=%3Bseq=72 (1900), p. 54
Other works
Nietzsche's Zarathustra (1988), p. 40
Book 3, Chapter 20, Section 5
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)
"The Holy Dimension", p. 329
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
Context: It seems as though we have arrived at a point in history, closest to the instincts and remotest from ideals, where the self stands like a wall between God and man. It is the period of a divine eclipse. We sail the seas, we count the stars, we split the atom, but never ask: Is there nothing but a dead universe and our reckless curiosity?
Primitive man's humble ear was alert to the inwardness of the world, while the modern man is presumptuous enough to claim that he has the sole monopoly over soul and spirit, that he is the only thing alive in the universe. … But there is a dawn of wonder and surprise in our souls, when the things that surround us suddenly slip off the triteness with which we have endowed them, and their strangeness opens like a gap between them and our mind, a gap that no words can fill. … What is the incense of self-esteem to him who tastes in all things the flavor of the utterly unknown, the fragrance of what is beyond our senses? There are neither skies nor oceans, neither birds nor trees — there are only signs of what can never be perceived. And all power and beauty are mere straws in the fire of a pure man's vision.
Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.9
Context: The corporeal element in man is a large screen and partition that prevents him from perfectly perceiving abstract ideals; this would be the case even if the corporeal element were as pure and superior as the substance of the spheres; how much more must this be the case with our dark and opaque body. However great the exertion of our mind may be to comprehend the Divine Being or any of the ideals, we find a screen and partition between God and us.
Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 6
“We all conceal
A god within us, we all deal
With heaven direct, from whose high places we derive
The inspiration by which we live.”
Est deus in nobis, et sunt commercia caeli:
Sedibus aetheriis spiritus ille venit.
Book III, lines 549–550 (tr. James Michie)
Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love)
Bishops in Africa Call for Appropriate Measures as Cases of COVID-19 are Confirmed https://www.aciafrica.org/news/925/bishops-in-africa-call-for-appropriate-measures-as-cases-of-covid-19-are-confirmed (5 March 2020)
