“There the Unstruck Music eddies around the Infinite One;
There in the midst the Throne of the Unheld is shining, whereon the great Being sits —
Millions of suns are shamed by the radiance of a single hair of His body.”
Songs of Kabîr (1915)
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Kabir 38
Indian mystic poet 1440–1518Related quotes
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 260.
Journal entry (20 April 1920); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 6
Opening lines of "The Hashish Eater; or, the Apocalypse of Evil" (1920)
“Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.”
Variant: And almost idly, in a kind of sidethought, Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.
Source: It (1986)
Alternate translation: Then in the middle of all stands the sun. For who, in our most beautiful temple, could set this light in another or better place, than that from which it can at once illuminate the whole? Not to speak of the fact that not unfittingly do some call it the light of the world, others the soul, still others the governor. Tremigistus calls it the visible God; Sophocles' Electra, the All-seer. And in fact does the sun, seated on his royal throne, guide his family of planets as they circle round him.
Book 1, Ch. 10, Alternate translation as quoted in Edwin Arthur Burtt in The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1925)
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543)
Context: At rest, however, in the middle of everything is the sun. For, in this most beautiful temple, who would place this lamp in another or better position than that from which it can light up the whole thing at the same time? For, the sun is not inappropriately called by some people the lantern of the universe, its mind by others, and its ruler by still others. The Thrice Greatest labels it a visible god, and Sophocles' Electra, the all-seeing. Thus indeed, as though seated on a royal throne, the sun governs the family of planets revolving around it.
"Anthropocentric Ethics", p. 319
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship