“An example of this way of thinking is an exchange that took place when someone told Goethe that he admired him for his genius, towering over German intellectual life like a gigantic mountain, to which Goethe replied that "great mountains are found only in mountainous landscapes." The traditional history of art is concerned exclusively which such mountain peaks, and often, as Goethe critically pointed out, they are not even seen in relation to each other.”

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 238.

Original in German: Einen solchen Standpunkt fand Goethe früh in Spinoza, und er erkennet mit Freuden, wie sehr die Ansichten dieses großen Denkers den Bedürfnissen seiner Jugend gemäß gewesen. Er fand in ihm sich selber, und so konnte er sich auch an ihm auf das schönste befestigen.
Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, 1831
A - F

1960s, Keep Moving From This Mountain (1965)
Context: We have allowed our civilization to outrun our culture; we have allowed our technology to outdistance our theology and for this reason we find ourselves caught up with many problems. Through our scientific genius we made of the world a neighborhood, but we failed through moral commitment to make of it a brotherhood, and so we’ve ended up with guided missiles and misguided men. And the great challenge is to move out of the mountain of practical materialism and move on to another and higher mountain which recognizes somehow that we must live by and toward the basic ends of life. We must move on to that mountain which says in substance, "What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world of means — airplanes, televisions, electric lights — and lose the end: the soul?"

Book Seven : The Church of the Social Revolution, "Christ and Caesar"
The Profits of Religion (1918)
Context: In the most deeply significant of the legends concerning Jesus, we are told how the devil took him up into a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time; and the devil said unto him: "All this power will I give unto thee, and the glory of them, for that is delivered unto me, and to whomsoever I will, I give it. If thou, therefore, wilt worship me, all shall be thine." Jesus, as we know, answered and said "Get thee behind me, Satan!" And he really meant it; he would have nothing to do with worldly glory, with "temporal power;" he chose the career of a revolutionary agitator, and died the death of a disturber of the peace. And for two or three centuries his church followed in his footsteps, cherishing his proletarian gospel. The early Christians had "all things in common, except women;" they lived as social outcasts, hiding in deserted catacombs, and being thrown to lions and boiled in oil.
But the devil is a subtle worm; he does not give up at one defeat, for he knows human nature, and the strength of the forces which battle for him. He failed to get Jesus, but he came again, to get Jesus' church. He came when, through the power of the new revolutionary idea, the Church had won a position of tremendous power in the decaying Roman Empire; and the subtle worm assumed the guise of no less a person than the Emperor himself, suggesting that he should become a convert to the new faith, so that the Church and he might work together for the greater glory of God. The bishops and fathers of the Church, ambitious for their organization, fell for this scheme, and Satan went off laughing to himself. He had got everything he had asked from Jesus three hundred years before; he had got the world's greatest religion.

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 4, hadith number 599
Sunni Hadith

Lecture from August 30, 1921, trans. Craig Holdrege

Source: The Cosmic Code (1982), p. 271

St. 3
Memorial Verses (1852)