Vol. IX - The Unity of Religious Ideals, Part I : Seeking for the Ideal http://wahiduddin.net/mv2/IX/IX_5.htm.
The Spiritual Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan
Context: Religion is a need of the human soul. In all periods and at every stage of the evolution of humanity there has been a religion which people followed, for at every period the need for religion has been felt. The reason is that the soul of man has several deep desires, and these desires are answered by religion.
The first desire is the search for the ideal. There comes a time when man seeks for a more complete justice than he finds among men, and when he seeks for someone on whom he can rely more surely than he can on his friends in the world. There comes a time when man feels a desire to open his heart to a Being who is above human beings and who can understand his heart.
“Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.”
“Desire can attain the darkest human terror and give an actual ideal of hell and its horror.”
“The first thing a man will do for his ideal is lie”
Source: History of Economic Analysis, p. 43
Letter to friend Loren Hickerson (December 13, 1941)
From the essay Strasberg Legacy
Source: The Human Form: Sculpture, Prints, and Drawings, 1977, p. 7.
Attributed to Bouguereau in: Sotheby's (Firm). (1994) 19th Century European Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture. p. 123; Cited in: Adolphe William Bouguereau Quotes http://www.artandinfluence.com/2010/10/adolphe-william-bouguereau-quotes.html by Armand Cabrera, Oct. 4, 2010.
“There is this first benefit from myths, that we have to search and do not have our minds idle.”
III. Concerning myths; that they are divine, and why.
On the Gods and the Cosmos
Context: There is this first benefit from myths, that we have to search and do not have our minds idle.
That the myths are divine can be seen from those who have used them. Myths have been used by inspired poets, by the best of philosophers, by those who established the mysteries, and by the Gods themselves in oracles. But why the myths are divine it is the duty of philosophy to inquire. Since all existing things rejoice in that which is like them and reject that which is unlike, the stories about the Gods ought to be like the Gods, so that they may both be worthy of the divine essence and make the Gods well disposed to those who speak of them: which could only be done by means of myths.
