Omnipresence

     A silence fell in the heavens. All the saints followed God's gaze and like him watched the shadow that hid half of Italy, and the hymns of the angels froze upon their lips, and the stars trembled, for they feared to have done some wrong, and waited humbly for God's angry word. But nothing of the kind happened. The heavens had opened in their whole breadth over Italy, so that Raphael was on his knees in Rome while the blessed Fra Angelica of Fiesole stood on a cloud and rejoiced over him. Many prayers were at that hour on their way from the earth. But God recognized only one thing: the strength of Michelangelo rose up to him like fragrance of vineyards. And he suffered it to fill his thoughts. He bent lower, found the striving man, looked beyond his shoulder at the hands that hovered listening about the stone, and started: Did the very stones have souls? Why was this man listening to the stones? And now the hands awoke and tore at the stone as at a grave, in which a faint, dying voice is flickering. 'Michelangelo,' cried God in dread, 'who is in that stone?' Michelangelo listened; his hands were trembling. Then he answered in a muffled voice: 'Thou, my God, who else? But I cannot reach Thee.' And then sensed that he was indeed in the stone, and he felt fearful and confined. The whole sky was but a stone, and he locked in its midst, hoping for the hands of Micheangelo to deliver him; and he heard them coming, though as yet afar.
     But the master was at work again. He thought continually: 'Thou art but a little block, and some one else might scarcely find one figure in thee. But I feel a shoulder here: it is that of Joseph of Arimathaea; and here Mary bends down: I sense the trembling of her hands that support Jesus, Our Lord, who has died on the cross. If in this little block of marble there is room for these three, why should I not sometime lift a whole sleeping race out of rock?....
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Stories of God, pp. 76-77.

     Sometimes I long for a convent cell, with the sublime wisdom of centuries set out on bookshelves all along the wall and a view across cornfields — there must be cornfields and they must wave in the breeze — and there I would immerse myself in the wisdom of the ages and in myself. Then I might perhaps find peace and clarity. But that would be no great feat. It is right here, in this very place, in the here and now that I must find them. But it is all so terrible difficult, and I feel so heavy-hearted.
— Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life - Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-43, p. 36.

     Yes, we carry everything within us, God and Heaven and Hell and Earth and Life and Death and all history. The externals are simply so many props; everything we need is within us. And we have to take everything that comes: the bad with the good, which does not mean we cannot devote our life to curing the bad. But we must know what motives inspire our struggle and we must begin with ourselves, every day anew.
— Etty Hillesum, Ibid, p. 162.

     Many would call me an unrealistic fool if they so much as suspected what I feel and think. And yet there exists in me all the  reality the day can bring. I must look up those sentences in Rathenaus' letter I copied out some time ago. That is what I shall miss later: here, I need only stretch out my hand to put my finger on so many words and passages. Out there, I shall simply have to carry everything inside me. One ought to be able to live without books, without anything. There will always be a small patch of sky above, and there will always be enough space to fold two hands in prayer.
— Etty Hillesum, Ibid, pp. 189-190.

....It has been amply demonstrated that attempting to use effort or will power to change beliefs or to cure bad habits has an adverse, rather than a beneficial effect. Emile Coué, the little French pharmacist who astonished the world around 1920 with the results he obtained with "the power of suggestion," insisted that effort was the one big reason most people failed to utilize their inner power. "Your suggestions (ideal goals) must be made without effort if they are to be effective," he said. Another famous Coué saying was his "Law of reversed Effort": "When the will and imagination are in conflict, the imagination invariably wins the day."
— Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics, pp. 54-55.

     Happiness is a mental habit, a mental attitude, and if it is not learned and practiced in the present it is never experienced. It cannot be made contingent upon solving some external problem. When one problem is solved another appears to take its place. Life is a series of problems. If you are to be happy at all, you must be happy — period! not happy "because of."
— Maxwell Maltz, Ibid., p. 90.