Present Holiness

Men take their misfortunes to heart, and keep them there. A gambler does not talk about his loses; the frequenter of brothels, who finds his favorite engaged by another, pretends to be just as well off without her; the professional street-brawler is quiet about the fights he has lost; and a merchant who speculates in goods will conceal the loses he may suffer. All act as one who steps on dog dung in the dark.
— Anthology of Japanese Literature, Donald Keene (ed.), p. 350, Theodore de Bary (tr.).

     One evening, more than twenty years ago, Giacometti was hit by a car while crossing the Place d'Italie. Though his leg was twisted, his first feeling, in the state of livid swoon into which he had fallen, was a kind of joy: "Something has happened to me at last!" I know his radicalism: he expected the worst. The life which he so loved and which he would not have changed for any other was knocked out of joint, perhaps shattered, by the stupid violence of chance: "So," he thought to himself, "I wasn't meant to be a sculptor, nor even to live. I wasn't meant for anything." What thrilled him was the menacing order of causes that was suddenly unmasked and the act of staring with the petrifying gaze of a cataclysm at the lights of the city, at human beings, at his own body lying flat in the mud: for a sculptor, the mineral world is never far away. I admire the will to welcome everything. If one likes surprises, one must like them to that degree, one must like even the rare flashes which reveal to devotees that the earth is not meant for them.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words (autobiography), pp. 232-233.

     What I like about my madness is that it has protected me from the very beginning against the charms of the "élite": never have I thought that I was the happy possessor of a "talent"; my sole concern has been to save myself — nothing in my hands, nothing up my sleeve — by work and faith. As a result, my pure choice did not raise me above anyone. Without equipment, without tools, I set all of me to work in order to save all of me. If I relegate impossible Salvation to the proproom, what remains? A whole man, composed of all men and as good as all of them and no better than any.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Ibid., last paragraph, p. 235.

     Said the Hafetz Hayyim: "We read in the Exodus 3:5 : 'Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.' Every man needs to attain a higher position in the realm of goodness. Do not say: 'I can uplift myself only under different circumstances.' No, the place whereon thou standest is holy ground, namely available for moral uplift. It is necessary only to put off thy uncleanness, and to strive to ascend to holier ground."
— Aryeh Pupko, Mikhtevei ha-Hafetz Hayyim, p. 94, in Maggidim and Hasidim: Their Wisdom, Louis I. Newman, p. 9.

     Once when the Rabbi of Tzanz was studying intently the subject of Emanation (a term of the Kabbalah) he began to cough violently. His son brought him a cup of hot tea and urged his father to drink it. The old Rabbi exclaimed: "In the World of Emanation tea is not drunk."
     "True, father," replied the son, "but in the World of Emanation one does not cough."
— Yeshua Raker, Der Sanger, Reb Hayyim Halberstamm, p. 100, in Ibid., p. 42.

     Rabbi Akiba Eger, the illustrious Rabbi of Posen, explained the Talmudic saying: "If the Former Teachers (Rishonim) were angels, we are men; if, however, they were men, we are donkeys." He said: "If we consider the words of the Former Sages as words of angels who cannot err, then we are men, and we labor to comprehend them. But if we consider the Former Sages to be mere men, liable to error, we ourselves behave like donkeys. Everytime we find a difficulty in their words, we remark: it is an error, and we do not labor to clarify the matter."
— S. Sopher, Hut Hameshulash, p. 60, in Ibid., p. 132.