“Whatever rushes upward and helps God to ascend is good. Whatever drags downward and impedes God from ascending is evil.”
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: What is the essence of our God? The struggle for freedom. In the indestructible darkness a flaming line ascends and emblazons the march of the Invisible. What is our duty? To ascend with this blood-drenched line.
Whatever rushes upward and helps God to ascend is good. Whatever drags downward and impedes God from ascending is evil.
All virtues and all evils take on a new value. They are freed from the moment and from earth, they exist completely within man, before and after man, eternally.
For the essence of our ethic is not the salvation of man, who varies within time and space, but the salvation of God, who within a wide variety of flowing human forms and adventures is always the same, the indestructible rhythm which battles for freedom.
We, as human beings, are all miserable persons, heartless, small, insignificant. But within us a superior essence drives us ruthlessly upward.
From within this human mire divine songs have welled up, great ideas, violent loves, an unsleeping assault full of mystery, without beginning or end, without purpose, beyond every purpose.
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Nikos Kazantzakis 222
Greek writer 1883–1957Related quotes
Source: A Confederacy of Dunces (1980, posthumous), Ch. 2, opening line
“Whatever good fortune befalls you, attribute it to the gods.”
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 230)
Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism (1879)
2000s
Context: One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced. In a world that has long been terrorized by fratricidal Sky-God religions, the ascendance of Buddhism would surely be a welcome development.
Theseus p. 119
Last of the Amazons (2002)
“Whatever comes from God is impossible for a man to turn back.”
These are the words of a great Muslim saint, 'AbdulQuddës of Gangoh. In the whole range of Sufi literature it will be probably difficult to find words which, in a single sentence, disclose such an acute perception of the psychological difference between the prophetic and the mystic types of consciousness. The mystic does not wish to return from the repose of "unitary experience"; and even when he does return, as he must, his return does not mean much for mankind at large.
Source: The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam http://www.allamaiqbal.com/works/prose/english/reconstruction/index.htm
“It's gonna be so good now
It's gonna be so good
Can you see the lark ascending?”
Song lyrics, Aerial (2005), A Sky of Honey (Disc 2)