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"“Computers are the darkrooms of the twenty first century” ― Roger Taylor, (Foreword', Approaching Photography, 2nd Edition, 2004, Photographers' Institute Press, ISBN 1 86108 323 8, p7)"

— Approaching Photography by Paul Hill (Page 7)

“The Vimalakirti Sutra, one of the most famous and influencial works of the Mahayana canon, is outstanding for the eloquent and orderly manner in which it expounds the basic tenets of Mahayana, the liveliness of its episodes, and its frequent touches of humor, these last a rarity in a religious work of this type. The Vimalakirti Sutra is also unusual in that its central figure is not a Buddha or Buddhas but a wealthy townsman of Shakyamuni’s time. Vimalakirti, who in his religious understanding and practice epitomizes the ideal lay believer. For this reason, and because of the sutra’s remarkable literary appeal, it has enjoyed particular popularity among lay Buddhists in China, Japan, and the other Asian countries where Mahayana doctrines prevail and has exercised a marked influence on their Mahayana Buddhism, it has held a place of particular importance in the Ch’an or Zen sect.” ― Burton Watson, (p2, Introduction, The Vimalakirti Sutra, tr Burton Watson 1999, from Chinese edition Kumarajiva, 406CE. Motilal Barnasidass, ISBN 978-81-208-1672-5)

— The Vimalakirti Sutra (Page 2)

"“And the more he treated her as though she were really very nice, the more Lotty expanded and became really very nice, and the more he, affected in his turn, became really very nice himself; so that they went round and round, not in a vicious but in a highly virtuous circle. ” ― Elizabeth von Arnim, (The Enchanted April', Seven Treasures Publications, 2011, p121)"

— The Enchanted April the Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim (Page 121)

"“All the radiance of April in Italy lay gathered together at her feet, The sun poured in on her, The sea lay asleep in it, hardly stirring, Across the bay the lovely mountains, exquisitely different in colour, were asleep too in the light; and underneath her window, at the bottom of the flower-starred gray slope from which the wall of the castle rose up, was a great cypress, cutting rough the delicate blues and violets and rose-colours of the mountains and the sea like a great black sword.” ― Elizabeth von Arnim, (The Enchanted April', Seven Treasures Publications, 2011, p40)"

— The Enchanted April the Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim (Page 40)

Systematic reasoning is something we could not, as a species or as individuals, possibly do without. But neither, if we are to remain sane, can we possibly do without direct perception, the more unsystematic the better, of the inner and outer worlds into which we have been born. This given reality is an infinite which passes all understanding and yet admits of being directly and in some sort totally apprehended. It is a transcendence belonging to another order than the human, and yet it may be present to us as a felt immanence, an experienced participation. To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness — to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves. Meanwhile, however, there are gratuitous graces

— The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley (Page 63 - 64)

We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half-opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all-too-familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.

— The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley (Page 60 - 61)

All I am suggesting is that the mescalin experience is what Catholic theologians call ‘a gratuitous grace’, not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large - this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual, For the intellectual is by definition the man for whom, in Goethe’s phrase, ‘the word is essentially fruitful’.

— The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley (Page 60)

An hour later, with ten more miles and the visit to the World's Biggest Drug Store safely behind us, we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as ‘being in one’s right mind’.

— The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley (Page 51)

An hour later, with ten more miles and the visit to the World's Biggest Drug Store safely behind us, we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as ‘being in one’s right mind’.

— The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley (Page 51)

The car had moved on; time was uncovering another manifestation of the eternal Suchness. ‘Within sameness there is difference. But that difference should be different from sameness is in no wise the intention of all the Buddhas. Their intention is both totality and differentiation.’ This bank of red and white geraniums, for example - it was entirely different from that stucco wall a hundred yards up the road. But the ‘is-ness’ of both was the same, the eternal quality of their transience was the same.

— The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley (Page 51)

The literature of religious experience abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the Mysterium tremendum, In theological language, this fear is due to the incompatibility between man’s egotism and the divine purity, between man’s self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God. Following Boehme and William Law, we may say that, by unregenerate souls, the divine Light at its full blaze can be apprehended only as a burning, purgatorial fire. An almost identical doctrine is to be found in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the departed soul is described as shrinking in agony from the Clear Light of the Void, and even from the lesser, tempered Lights, in order to rush headlong into the comforting darkness of selfhood as a reborn human being, or even as a beast, an unhappy ghost, a denizen of hell. Anything rather than the burning brightness of unmitigated Reality — anything!

— The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley (Page 46 - 47)