“I believe that I have cosmic religious feelings. I never could grasp how one could satisfy these feelings by praying to limited objects. The tree outside is life, a statue is dead. The whole of nature is life, and life, as I observe it, rejects a God resembling man. I like to experience the universe as one harmonious whole. Every cell has life. Matter, too, has life; it is energy solidified. Our bodies are like prisons, and I look forward to be free, but I don't speculate on what will happen to me. I live here now, and my responsibility is in this world now.... I deal with natural laws. This is my work here on earth.”

Pt. VIII, ch. 19
Anna Karenina (1875–1877; 1878)

Source: 21st Century, Robert Rauschenberg, Works, Writings and Interviews, 2006, p. 37

On her film Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), in an interview at Apple.com http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/in-action/?movie=july

Source: Drowning Instinct

Speech in Stourport (12 January 1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 15-16.
1925
Context: If there is anything... it is my training, which has given me, whether I can use it or not, a knowledge and a sympathy very difficult for any man to attain who has had an exclusively political training I regard it as of the greatest value to myself that during the formative years of my life, and during the ten and twenty years when I first started work in the world, I worked in close contact with all classes of people in this country, and enjoyed, through no credit to myself, the goodwill which I have inherited from generations that have gone before me and left behind a name for honesty, fair play, right judgment, and kindliness to those with whom they worked. Through that, whether I succeed or not, I believe I have an understanding of the mind of the people of the country which I could have gained in no other way. It is through this that I have that ineradicable belief and faith in our people which sustains me through good times and evil, and it is because of this that I have every confidence that, whatever troubles may come to this country, or in this country at any time, the native strength and virtue of our people will overcome everything. There is only one thing which I feel is worth giving one's whole strength to, and that is the binding together of all classes of our people in an effort to make life in this country better in every sense of the word. That is the main end and object of my life in politics.

Audio lecture, "History Ends In Green" ( Pt. 11 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB9zIygfxLc Pt. 12 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epymX5t41kw)
Context: What you see, I think is the morphogenetic field. The invisible world that holds everything together. Not the net of matter and light, but the net of casuistry — of intentionality, of caring, of hope of dream — of thought. That all is there, but it has been hidden from us for centuries because of the exorcism of the spirit that took place in order to allow science to do business. And that monotonous and ill-considered choice has made us the inheritors of a tradition of existential emptiness — but that has impalded to us to go back to the jungles and recover this thing. … The question is, can we dream a dream that is sufficiently noble that we give meaning to the sacrifices that have been made to allow the 20th century to exist … I am convinced that if there were no shamanic pipeline, there would be no higher life, as we know it, on this planet. … We are all cells of a much larger body, and like the cells of our own body it is hard for us to glimpse the whole pattern of the whole of what is happening, and yet we can sense that there is a purpose, and there is a pattern...

Source: The Thief

"On Going on a Journey"
Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)