Quotes on Mud

Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys! They clamber over one another and thus drag one another into the mud and the depth. They all want to get to the throne: that is their madness — as if happiness sat on the throne. Often, mud sits on the throne — and often the throne also on mud. Mad they all appear to me, clambering monkeys and overardent. Foul smells their idol, the cold monster: foul, they smell to me altogether, these idolators.

Politicians must set their aims for the high ground and according to our various leanings, Democratic, Republican, Independent, we will follow. Politicians must be told if they continue to sink into the mud of obscenity, they will proceed alone.

The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.

Why do we argue? Life's so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.

Our love was born outside the walls, in the wind, in the night, in the earth, and that's why the clay and the flower, the mud and the roots know your name.

Like the lotus which thrives in mud, the potential for realization grows in the rich soil of everyday life

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman?

A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy--writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?

I never allowed myself the luxury of those brilliant, beautiful colors until I went to India and saw people walking around in them or dragging them in the mud. I realised they were not so artificial.

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion, through the alluvium which covers the globe, through poetry and philosophy and religion, through church and state, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, till we come to a hard bottom that rocks in place which we can call reality and say, "This is and no mistake.

We can't blame children for occupying themselves with Facebook rather than playing in the mud. Our society doesn't put a priority on connecting with nature. In fact, too often we tell them it's dirty and dangerous.

When the mind is turbulent, uncontrolled and restless, it is like a pond of water that is filled with mud. Therefore when we look within ourselves, all we perceive is the mud of our material conceptions of life. But when the mind is still through discipline, and through yoga, it is like a pond that has no waves and no turbulence. Then we can perceive through that crystal clear water the eternal nature of our soul.

When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.

Before I was humiliated I was like a stone that lies in deep mud, and he who is mighty came and in his compassion raised me up and exalted me very high and placed me on the top of the wall.

You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle.

I'm saying your name in the grocery store, I'm saying your name on the bridge at dawn. Your name like an animal covered with frost, your name like a music that's been transposed, a suit of fur, a coat of mud, a kick in the pants, a lungful of glass, the sails in wind and the slap of waves on the hull.

Have patience. Wait until the mud settles and the water is clear. Remain unmoving until right action arises by itself.

Children get smashed for hours on some strictly limited aspect of the Great Big Everything, the Universe, such as water or snow or mud or colors or rocks.