Plumb The Depths Quotes

I have a head for heights it's true, but no stomach for the depths. Strange then to have plumbed so many.

His love for my mother wasn't about looking back and loving something that would never change. It was about loving my mother for everything -- for her brokenness and her fleeing, for her being there right then in that moment before the sun rose and the hospital staff came in. It was about touching that hair with the side of his fingertip, and knowing yet plumbing fearlessly the depths of her ocean eyes.

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words “compelle intrare,” compel them to come in, have been so abused be wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

The most experienced psychologist or observer of human nature knows infinitely less of the human heart than the simplest Christian who lives beneath the Cross of Jesus. The greatest psychological insight, ability, and experience cannot grasp this one thing: what sin is. Worldly wisdom knows what distress and weakness and failure are, but it does not know the godlessness of man. And so it also does not know that man is destroyed only by his sin and can be healed only by forgiveness. Only the Christian knows this. In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man; in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner. The psychiatrist must first search my heart and yet he never plumbs its ultimate depth. The Christian brother knows when I come to him: here is a sinner like myself, a godless man who wants to confess and yearns for God’s forgiveness. The psychiatrist views me as if there were no God. The brother views me as I am before the judging and merciful God in the Cross of Jesus Christ.

who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of man, and His compulsion is our liberation.

Downstairs in the lounge, by the third pillar from the left, there sits an old lady with a sweet, placid, spinsterish face and a mind that has plumbed the depths of human iniquity and taken it all as in the day's work....where crime is concerned, she's the goods.

Wanderer, who are you? I watch you go on your way, without scorn, without love, with impenetrable eyes - damp and downhearted, like a plumb line that returns unsatisfied from every depth back into the light (what was it looking for down there?), with a breast that does not sigh, with lips that hide their disgust, with a hand that only grips slowly: who are you? What have you done? Take a rest here, this spot is hospitable to everyone, - relax! And whoever you may be: what would you like now? What do you find relaxing? Just name it: I'll give you whatever I have! - "Relaxing? Relaxing? How inquisitive you are! What are you saying! But please, give me - -" What? What? Just say it! - "Another mask! A second mask!" ...

I'd say the depths of his stupidity have yet to be plumbed, and yours is comin' up fast on the inside turn.

At some point, a wave of repressed emotion broke through my armor, demanding expression and release. As I plumbed the depths of my despair, I shed one layer of pain after another. My inner world was like a series of reservoirs, each holding a different wave of emotional memory behind them. When one reservoir burst, another soon appeared. This phase went on for many months—the first of many essential release phases.

Every time I think my family has plumbed the depths of stupidity, somebody goes and finds a goddamn shovel.” —Jane Harrington-Price

‎Maeniel felt this was why all the great sages never wrote anything down. In the final analysis, scriptures are futile things, dependent as they are on the intentions of the interpreter. All too often too literal a mind can lead human students into strange follies. Sometimes it is better to allow the searchers to try to plumb the depths of the great mystery on their own and accept that not every one of those taking the road will see the same end.

I have lived now for over a century, yet I can still say with complete confidence that no one can claim to have plumbed the depths of human misery who has not shared the fore-ends of a submarine with a camel.

No, I'm not Byron, it's my role To be an undiscovered wonder, Like him, a persecuted wand'rer, But furnished with a Russian soul. I started sooner, sooner ending, My mind will never reach so high; Within my soul, beyond the mending, My shattered aspirations lie: Dark ocean answer me, can any Plumb all your depth with skillful trawl? Who will explain me to the many? I... perhaps God? No one at all?

I have given up attempting to plumb the depths of the female psyche, Watson. It is not unlike contemplating infinity--a worthy, even a spiritual meditation, destined from the beginning to fail entirely.

I ’ve often felt separate from other human beings. I have my moments of togetherness with others; I love all sentient beings with my heart and am wildly fortunate to have friends I can talk to, share joy and despair with; we loyally have each other’s back. I wordlessly communicate with other musicians, sometimes plumbing great depths. But I’m awkward with other people, sometimes even my closest friends. My mind wanders, seeing others hold hands in a circle, from my separate place. My earliest memories are rooted in an underlying sense that something’s wrong with me, that everyone else is clued into a group consciousness from which I’m excluded. Like something in me is broken. As time passes I become more comfortable with this strange sense of being apart, but it never leaves, and on occasion, I go through phases of intense and debilitating anxiety. Gnarly fucking panic attacks. Perhaps it is a form of self-loathing, that I’m often unable to find comfort in community. Am I the only one who’s fucked up like this? Can I get a witness?

Madeleine in her turn stared at him steadily, straight into his eyes, in a profound, strange way, as if seeking to read something there, as if seeking to discover there that hidden part of a human being which can never be fathomed but may perhaps be glimpsed for a fleeting instant, in those moments of unguardedness or surrender or inattention, that are like doors left ajar onto the mysterious depths of the spirit... they stood for a few seconds, each gazing into the other's eyes, each striving to reach the impenetrable secret of the other's heart, to probe each other's thoughts to the quick. They tried, in a mute and passionate questioning, to see the other's conscience in its essential truth: the intimate struggles of two beings who, living side by side, never really know one another, who suspect and sniff around and spy on one another, but cannot plumb the miry depths of one another's soul.

Misfortune is needed to plumb certain mysterious depths in the understanding of men; pressure is needed to explode the charge.

We have indeed left an impressive example of subservience. Just as Rome of old explored the limits of freedom, so have we plumbed the depths of slavery, robbed by informers even of the interchange of speech. We would have lost our memories as well as our tongues had it been as easy to forget as to be silent.

He knew what he was, what depths of depravity and cruelty he had plumbed, what ambitions drove him. He prided himself on knowing those things—but that didn’t mean he needed anyone else to see them as well.

How fathomless the mystery of the Unseen is! We cannot plumb its depths with our feeble senses - with eyes which cannot see the infinitely small or the infinitely great, nor anything too close or too distant, such as the beings who live on a star or the creatures which live in a drop of water... with ears that deceive us by converting vibrations of the air into tones that we can hear, for they are sprites which miraculously change movement into sound, a metamorphosis which gives birth to harmonies which turn the silent agitation of nature into song... with our sense of smell, which is poorer than any dog's... with our sense of taste, which is barely capable of detecting the age of a wine! Ah! If we had other senses which would work other miracles for us, how many more things would we not discover around us!

It was the blue-tinged taste of a regret so deep you could never plumb its depths. It was the victory at Rajal that never came, it was his brother walking away down the long dark wood corridor, it was a life he might have had in Yhelteth if disgust and fury had not sent him away in disgrace instead. It was the slaves he could not free, the screaming women and children of Ennishmin he could not save, the piled-up, silent dead and the smashed-in, ruined homes. It was every wrong decision he'd ever made, every path he'd failed to walk, fanned out and held up for him to understand, and it hurt.

The Buddhas and the Christs are born complete. They neither seek love nor give love, because they are love itself. But we who are born again and again must discover the meaning of love, must learn to live love as the flower lives beauty. How wonderful, if only you can believe it, act on it! Only the fool, the absolute fool, is capable of it. He alone is free to plumb the depths and scour the heavens. His innocence preserves him. He asks no protection.

No amount of therapy, dream analysis, word association, experiment or brain-scanning can recover a person’s ‘true motives’, not because they are difficult to find, but because there is nothing to find. It is not hard to plumb our mental depths because they are so deep and so murky, but because there are no mental depths to plumb.

The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words...'compel them to come in,' have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

Misfortune is needed to plumb certain mysterious depths in the understanding of men.

I have a head for heights it's true, but no stomach for the depths. Strange then to have plumbed so many.

I had an opportunity to plumb the depths of someone else’s soul and sense, alternatively, the scorching heat of its love and suffering and the icy cold of its terrible desperation.

Mr Wooster, I am not ashamed to say that the tears came into my eyes as I listened to them. It amazes me that a man as young as you can have been able to plumb human nature so surely to its depths; to play with so unerring a hand on the quivering heart-strings of your reader; to write novels so true, so human, so moving, so vital!" "Oh, it's just a knack," I said.

For he had learned tonight that love was not enough. There had to be a higher devotion than all the devotions of this fond imprisonment. There had to be a larger world than this glittering fragment of a world with all its wealth and privilege. Throughout his whole youth and early manhood, this very world of beauty, ease, and luxury, of power, glory, and security, had seemed the ultimate end of human ambition, the furthermost limit to which the aspirations of any man could reach. But tonight, in a hundred separate moment of intense reality, it had revealed to him its very core. He had seen it naked, with its guards down. He had sensed how the hollow pyramid of a false social structure had been erected and sustained upon a base of common mankind's blood and sweat and agony...Privilege and truth could not lie down together. He thought of how a silver dollar, if held close enough to the eye, could blot out the sun itself. There were stronger, deeper tides and currents running in America than any which these glamorous lives tonight had ever plumbed or even dreamed of. Those were the depths he would like to sound.

It teaches you about the human heart. Suffering and despair force you to plumb the depths of the human heart in a way normal life can’t. It makes us wise beyond our years. Most people just go along.

However cruelly fate treats people, however miserable life can be, there are those who will accept the challenge to plumb the depths of that misery to find the essence of what really lies deep inside themselves.

How many of us can honestly say that we have plumbed the depths of our minds and hearts? How many of us regularly listen to ourselves with empathy and understanding—in the supportive way that a trusted friend can?

No one wants this crap illness that masquerades as personal failing. I had no desire to plumb its depths. The struggle to function leaves me little capacity to do so. But in the end I had no choice. I approached this enemy I barely believed in the only way I knew how: as a reporter. I took a topic about which I knew nothing and sought somehow to know everything. I talked to people in search of answers and mostly found more questions.

Now as you plumb out into the universe and explore it astronomically, it gets very strange. You begin to see things in the depths that at first sight seem utterly remote. How could they have anything to do with us. They are so far off and so unlikely. And in the same way, when you start probing into the inner workings of the human body you come across all kinds of funny little monsters and wiggly things that bear no resemblance to what we recognize as the human image. Look at a spermatozoon under a microscope. That little tadpole! And how can that have any connection with a grown human being. It’s so unlike, you see. It’s foreign feeling. And you get the creeps, a foreign feeling, about yourself...But what we will always find out in the end when we meet the very strange thing, there will one day be the dawning recognition: Why that’s me.

I thought maybe Against Nature would be a book about someone who viewed things the way I did—someone trying to live a life unmarred by laziness, cowardice, and conformity. I was wrong; it was more a book about interior decoration. In his free moments from plumbing the subrational depths of upholstery, the main character devoted himself to the preparation of all-black meals, to hanging out with a jewel-encrusted tortoise, and thinking thoughts like, “All is syphilis.” How was that an aesthetic life?

Like many fellow travelers who’ve crossed the Styx and returned, I view the itinerary as transformational. On the one hand, I won’t join that cohort claiming gratitude for their time in hell; on the other, I can say that in the wake of my depression, I’m pierced by other people as I wasn’t before, that I waste less time entertaining myself, and that I hear my thoughts with a useful attention to their tenor, fairness, and sanity. I feel equanimous most of the time, and have a strong impulse to give. My life has become, if you will, intentional, in a way it might not be if I hadn’t made my plummet. William Styron died in 2006. During the last third of his life, after the publication of Darkness Visible, he became a mental health advocate. I’m among those aided by his account, who found in it succor, but I’m also mindful of complaints such as those in Joel P. Smith’s essay “Depression: Darker Than Darkness”—that Styron was depressed for months, not years; that he was never alone; that he had the best of treatment; that he stayed in a hospital “as comfortable as they come”; and that he didn’t have to rely on radical remedies like electroshock therapy: all of this to say that Styron didn’t plumb the depths and can’t represent the depressed, and neither can I. Others have and have had it worse. For them, depression never yields or lessens. For them there’s no rising into the light of day, no edifications, and no gains, nothing but the wish to be dead, which is, after a marathon of untenable suffering, granted. “E

Yet why must it be that men always seek out the depths, the abyss? Why must thought, like a plumb line, concern itself exclusively with vertical descent? Why was it not feasible for thought to change direction and climb vertically up, ever up, towards the surface? Why should the area of the skin, which guarantees a human being’s existence in space, be most despised and left to the tender mercies of the senses? I could not understand the laws governing the motion of thought—the way it was liable to get stuck in unseen chasms whenever it set out to go deep; or, whenever it aimed at the heights, to soar away into boundless and equally invisible heavens, leaving the corporeal form undeservedly neglected.

Who can plumb its depths? And yet it is a faculty of my soul. Although it is part of my nature, I cannot understand all that I am.

DEDICATE YOURSELF this day to me, to my service, and to the service of humanity. Service is a wonderful healer, for as you forget yourself in service, you will find you will grow and expand in the most wonderful way. You will reach great heights and plumb great depths, and your love and understanding of life will begin to mean something to you. This day will afford you countless opportunities for stretching and growing. Accept each one with a heart filled with love and gratitude, and feel yourself growing in consciousness and in wisdom. Live it fully and abundantly with no restrictions, no limitations. Expect only the very best in everything and everyone, and see it come forth. Keep your heart open to one another. Look for the highest good in each other, and work from that higher level of consciousness. Encourage one another in every way possible; every soul needs encouragement. You will find as you help others, you help yourself to grow at the same time.

Can such a man, you ask, be a leader of the masses? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. The masses — by which I mean not the proletariat, but the anonymous collective body into which all of us, high and low, amalgamate at certain moments — react most strongly to someone who least resembles them. Normality coupled with talent may make a politician popular. But to provoke extremes of love and hate, to be worshipped like a god or loathed like the devil, is given only to a truly exceptional person who is poles apart from the masses, be it far above or far below them. If my experience of Germany has taught me anything, it is this: Rathenau and Hitler are the two men who excited the imagination of the German masses to the utmost; the one by his ineffable culture, the other by his ineffable vileness. Both, and this is decisive, came from inaccessible regions, from some sort of “beyond.” The one from a sphere of sublime spirituality where the cultures of three millennia and two continents hold a symposium; the other from a jungle far below the depths plumbed by the basest penny dreadfuls, from an underworld where demons rise from a brewed-up stench of petty-bourgeois back rooms, doss-houses, barrack latrines, and the hangman’s yard. From their different “beyonds” they both drew

What might you not have done, had you been free?’ ‘Perhaps nothing: the overflowing of my brain might have evaporated in mere futilities. Misfortune is needed to plumb certain mysterious depths in the understanding of men; pressure is needed to explode the charge. My captivity concentrated all my faculties on a single point. They had previously been dispersed, now they clashed in a narrow space; and, as you know, the clash of clouds produces electricity, electricity produces lightning and lightning gives light.

Why must it be that men always seek out the depths, the abyss? Why must thought, like a plumb line, concern itself exclusively with vertical descent? Why was it not feasible for thought to change direction and climb vertically up, ever up, towards the surface?

I’d spent years learning to swim in the turbulent currents of physical attraction—wanting to be desired, resisting others’ unwelcome advances, plumbing the mysterious depths of my own longing. I’d spent countless hours studying my reflection in the mirror—admiring it, hating it, wondering what others thought of it. It seemed to me that if I had applied the same relentless scrutiny to another subject I could have become enlightened, completed a doctorate degree, or at least figured out how to grow an organic vegetable garden.

By trying to export myself into a place that didn't fully exist I asked works of art to bear my expectation that they could be better than life, that they could redeem life. In fact, I believe they are, and do. My life is dedicated to that belief. But still, I asked too much of them: I asked them also to be both safer than life and fuller, a better family. That they couldn't give. At the depths I'd plumb them, so many perfectly sufficient works of art would become thin, anemic. I sucked the juice out of what I loved until I found myself in a desert, sucking rocks for water.

Whom do I trust? Where is my faith? Those are the questions that all worriers must ask, yet all of us already know the answer. Our trust is divided. We don’t put all our eggs in one basket—even God’s—because that’s too risky. Our trust might not pay off the way we hope. We are reluctant to simply say to our Father, “I am yours,” and stop worrying. Jesus knows this. Fear and worry reveal that our faith is indeed small. If you are looking to plumb the depths of worry, you can find it in your mixed allegiances. You trust God for some things but not others. You trust him for heaven but not for earth.

Thoughts said aloud are mutant by nature. No matter how expertly one plumbs the depths of subjective understanding, Gorgias realized to his horror, or how artistically rendered and devastatingly precise language may be, truth still falls on ears that hear something altogether different from what exists in reality.

We want our faith to be “perfect and complete.” But who wants to go through trials to make it happen? The problem is, perseverance doesn’t come from listening to a sermon. There is no inspirational bestseller we can read that will help us plumb the depths of our faith. We don’t become perfect and complete by sitting in church. We learn who he really is during the most desperate part of our trials. It’s about meeting God where and when we need him most. Sure, our faith grows through reading Scripture and praying, but just as we don’t know the strength of our body until we test it in a physical challenge, our faith isn’t perfected until it’s been tested in a spiritual challenge.

The Chinese are well acquainted with this way of seeing things; they often use the image of water to illustrate it. To see down to the bottom of a lake, the water must be calm and still. The calmer the water, the farther down one can see. The exact same thing is true for the mind—the more tranquil and detached one is, the greater the depths one can plumb.

I'll be glad to be rid of you. When a man sinks to reading fashion journals - no, it's worse than that. When a man finds himself plumbing their depths, seeking arcane knowledge of no use to him whatsoever ... Oh, it's your corrupting influence. I shall be glad to see the back of you, Noirot, and return to my life.' 'It annoys you to be a guardian angel,' she said.

Misfortune is needed to plumb certain mysterious depths in the understanding of men; pressure is needed to explode the charge. My captivity concentrated all my faculties on a single point. They had previously been dispersed, now they clashed in a narrow space; and, as you know, the clash of clouds produces electricity, electricity produces lightning and lightning gives light.

How would you like to live billions upon billions of lives?” Paul asked. “There’s a fabric of legends for you! Think of all those experiences, the wisdom they’d bring. But wisdom tempers love, doesn’t it? And it puts a new shape on hate. How can you tell what’s ruthless unless you’ve plumbed the depths of both cruelty and kindness? You should fear me, Mother. I am the Kwisatz Haderach.

I find attempts to create bilingual gospels laughable, in particular the attempt to translate the service from Church Slavonic into Russian. What for? In order not to make the effort and not to learn the divine, if somewhat artificial but solemn, language specially carved for this purpose? This language also provides a link with a tradition which is realized at depths and which the modern Russian language cannot plumb.

This was all splendid stuff for Luciaphils; it was amazing how at a first glance she recognised everybody. The gallery, too, was full of dears and darlings of a few weeks' standing, and she completed a little dinner-party for next Tuesday long before she had made the circuit. All the time she kept Stephen by her side, looked over his catalogue, put a hand on his arm to direct his attention to some picture, took a speck of alien material off his sleeve, and all the time the entranced Adele felt increasingly certain that she had plumbed the depth of the adorable situation. Her sole anxiety was as to whether Stephen would plumb it too. He might--though he didn't look like it--welcome these little tokens of intimacy as indicating something more, and when they were alone attempt to kiss her, and that would ruin the whole exquisite design. Luckily his demeanour was not that of a favoured swain; it was, on the other hand, more the demeanour of a swain who feared to be favoured, and if that shy thing took fright, the situation would be equally ruined. . . . To think that the most perfect piece of Luciaphilism was dependent on the just perceptions of Stephen! As the three made their slow progress, listening to Lucia's brilliant identifications, Adele willed Stephen to understand; she projected a perfect torrent of suggestion towards his mind. He must, he should understand. . .

From the ashes of failure, sorrow, hardship, and loss, the most exquisite souls arise, their journey marked by empathy and humility. Those who have plumbed the depths of despair and emerged, transformed, possess an ineffable beauty of spirit that cannot be denied. They, tempered by adversity, radiate empathy, humility, and a profound reverence for life, serving as beacons of inspiration to all who behold them. Remember, dear ones, the most exquisite spirits are not born of idyllic circumstances but are forged in the crucible of life's trials.

White men's stories continue to be considered Important and Universal. If the films of Quentin Tarantino, Stanley Kubrick, or Christopher Nolan don't "speak" to you, you are considered by other filmmakers and creatives to be a philistine of the highest order, one who is simply too ignorant to grasp the depth of their genius. But men can hardly be expected to sit through the films of those female filmmakers most radically plumbing the depths of the female experience—Karyn Kusama, Jane Campion, Tamara Jenkins. After all, they are telling "small" and "personal" stories.

One of the most common misconceptions about the world's religions is that they plumb the same depths, ask the same questions. They do not. Only religions that see God as all good ask how a good God can allow millions to die in a tsunami. Only religions that believe in souls ask whether your soul exists before you are born and what happens to it after you die. And only religions that think we have one soul ask after "the soul" in the singular. Every religion, however, asks after the human condition. Here we are in these human bodies. What now? What next? What are we to become?

The guiding factor for the development of Christian doctrine is the Bible itself! The text of Scripture provides the grounds and, most important, the limits for this development over time. Rather than bringing in outside influences (such as tradition), we recognize that no one has ever plumbed the depths of God's revelation contained in Scripture; no one has ever come close to exhausting what is to be found in its pages. Therefore, real development of Christian doctrine is simply our ever-increasing understanding of the Word. It is a delving deeper and deeper into the truths of the Word.

Anybody who lives beneath the Cross and who has discerned in the Cross of Jesus the utter wickedness of all men and of his own heart will find there is no sin that can ever be alien to him. Anybody who has once been horrified by the dreadfulness of his own sin that nailed Jesus to the Cross will no longer be horrified by even the rankest sins of a brother. Looking at the Cross of Jesus, he knows the human heart. He knows how utterly lost it is in sin and weakness, how it goes astray in the ways of sin, and he also knows that it is accepted in grace and mercy. Only the brother under the Cross can hear a confession. It is not experience of life but experience of the Cross that makes one a worthy hearer of confessions. The most experienced psychologist or observer of human nature knows infinitely less of the human heart than the simplest Christian who lives beneath the Cross of Jesus. The greatest psychological insight, ability, and experience cannot grasp this one thing: what sin is. Worldly wisdom knows what distress and weakness and failure are, but it does not know the godlessness of men. And so it also does not know that man is destroyed only by his sin and can be healed only by forgiveness. Only the Christian knows this. In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man; in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner. The psychiatrist must first search my heart and yet he never plumbs its ultimate depth. The Christian brother knows when I come to him: here is a sinner like myself, a godless man who wants .to confess and yearns for God’s forgiveness. The psychiatrist views me as if there were no God. The brother views me as I am before the judging and merciful God in the Cross of Jesus Christ. It is not lack of psychological knowledge but lack of love for the crucified Jesus Christ that makes us so poor and inefficient in brotherly confession.

why must it be that men always seek out the depths, the abyss ? Why must thought, like a plumb line, concern itself exclusively with vertical descent? Why was it not feasible for thought to change direction and climb vertically up, ever up, towards the surface? Why should the area of the skin, which guarantees a human being's existence in space, be most despised and left to the tender mercies of the senses? I could not understand the laws governing the motion of thought—the way it was liable to get stuck in unseen chasms whenever it set out to go deep; or, whenever it aimed at the heights, to soar away into boundless and equally invisible heavens, leaving the corporeal form undeservedly neglected.

Wanderer, who are you? I watch you go on your way, without scorn, without love, with impenetrable eyes--damp and downhearted, like a plumb limb that returns unsatisfied from every depth back into the light (what was it looking for down there?), with a breast that does not sigh, with lips that hide their disgust, with a hand that only grips slowly: who are you? What have you done? Take a rest here, this spot is hospitable to everyone, - relax! And whoever you may be: what would you like now? What do you find relaxing? Just name it: I'll give you whatever I have! - "Relaxing? Relaxing? How inquisitive you are! What are you saying! But please, give me - -" "What? What? Just say it!" - "Another mask! A second mask!...

It is true that a moment earlier, before Françoise had appeared, I had thought that I no longer loved Albertine, believing that I had taken everything into account, that I was completely lucid and that I had plumbed the depths of my heart. But however great our intelligence, it cannot conceive all the elements that constitute it and which remain undetected as long as no event capable of isolating them makes them start to solidify out of the volatile state in which they exist for most of the time. I was mistaken when I thought that I saw clearly into my heart. But this knowledge, which the finest insights of my intellect had not given me, had just been brought home to me, as hard, dazzling and strange as crystals of salt, through the sudden stimulus of pain.

Being psychological means that one will need to find the new, the personal myth from within. It will not be found in an external ideology or institution, however benignly intended it may be, for those sources which may have served the past have too often grown self-perpetuating, preserving their own priesthood or corporate leadership, and rigidifying an original primal experience into dogma and formal principles. One will find, sooner or later, that the pneuma, or spirit, has long departed those ideas and places. Nor will right thinking or rational principles of conduct and behavior satisfy the soul. We will not be spared our anxieties, moments of deep despair, and appointments with the fellow with the scythe at the door. No amount of ritual prayer, healthful practices, or salutary motives will plumb the soul’s depths. Quite likely, the soul will speak to us at least some of the time in ways we do not want to hear. But it is speaking, always, and tells of us of that invisible world, which informs, moves, and shapes the visible world.

need say was I need some time off. But she couldn’t do it. “The St. James house at half-past seven,” she repeated. “Got it, sir.” He rang off. Barbara hung up. She tried to plumb the depths of her feelings, to put a name to what was slowly washing through her veins. She wanted to call it shame. She knew it was liberation. She went to tell her father that they would need to reschedule his doctor’s appointment for another day. Kevin Whateley had not gone to the Royal Plantagenet, which was the pub next door to his cottage. Rather, he had walked along the embankment, past the triangular green where he and Matthew had once learned to operate their pair of remote-control planes, and had instead entered an older pub that stood on a spit of land reaching like a curled finger into the Thames. He’d chosen the Blue Dove deliberately. In the Royal Plantagenet—despite its proximity to his house—he might have forgotten for five minutes or so. But the Blue Dove would not allow him to do so. He sat at a table that overlooked the water. In spite of the night’s falling temperature, someone was out, night fishing from a boat, and lights bobbed periodically with the river’s movement. Kevin watched this, allowing his memory to fill with the image of Matthew running along that same dock, falling, damaging a knee, righting himself but not crying at all, even when the blood began to seep from the cut, even when the stitches were later put in. He was a brave little bloke, always had been. Kevin forced his eyes from the dock and fastened them on the mahogany table. Beer mats covered it, advertising Watney’s, Guinness, and Smith’s. Carefully, Kevin stacked them, restacked them, spread them out like cards, restacked them again. He felt how shallow his breathing was and knew that he needed to take in more air. But to breathe deeply was to lose his grip for an instant. He wouldn’t do that. For if he lost control, he didn’t know how he would get it back. So he did without air. He waited. He didn’t know if the man he sought would come into the pub this late on a Sunday night, mere minutes before closing. In fact, he didn’t even know if the man came here at all any longer. But years ago he’d been a regular customer, when Patsy worked long hours behind the bar, before she’d got her job in a South Kensington hotel. For Matthew’s sake, she had said when she’d taken on the

Much more than skeleton, it is flash, I mean the carrion flesh, which disturb and alarm us – and which alleviates us as well. The Buddhists monks gladly frequented charnel houses: where corner desire more surely and emancipate oneself from it? The horrible being a path of liberation in every period of fervor and inwardness, our remains have enjoyed great favor. In the Middle Ages, a man made a regimen of salvation, he believed energetically: the corpse was in fashion. Faith was vigorous than, invincible; it cherished the livid and the fetid, it knew the profits to be derived from corruption and gruesomeness. Today, an edulcorated religion adheres only to „nice” hallucinations, to Evolution and to Progress. It is not such a religion which might afford us the modern equivalent of the dense macabre. „Let a man who aspires to nirvana act so that nothing is dear to him”, we read in a Buddhist text. It is enough to consider these specters, to meditate on the fate of the flash which adhered to them, in order to understand the urgency of detachment. There is no ascesis in the double rumination on the flesh and on the skeleton, on the dreadful decrepitude of the one and the futile permanence of the other. It is a good exercise to sever ourselves now and then from our face, from our skin, to lay aside this deceptive sheathe, then to discard – if only for a moment – that layer of grease which keeps us from discerning what is fundamental in ourselves. Once exercise is over, we are freer and more alone, almost invulnerable. In other to vanquish attachments and the disadvantages which derive from them, we should have to contemplate the ultimate nudity of a human being, force our eyes to pierce his entrails and all the rest, wallow in the horror of his secretions, in his physiology of an imminent corpse. This vision would not be morbid but methodical, a controlled obsession, particularly salutary in ordeals. The skeleton incites us to serenity; the cadaver to renunciation. In the sermon of futility which both of them preach to us happiness is identified with the destruction of our bounds. To have scanted no detail of such a teaching and even so to come to terms with simulacra! Blessed was the age when solitaries could plumb their depths without seeming obsessed, deranged. Their imbalance was not assigned a negative coefficient, as is the case for us. They would sacrifice ten, twenty years, a whole life, for a foreboding, for a flash of the absolute. The word „depth” has a meaning only in connection with epochs when the monk was considered as the noblest human exemplar. No one will gain – say the fact that he is in the process of disappearing. For centuries, he has done no more than survive himself. To whom would he address himself, in a universe which calls him a „parasite”? In Tibet, the last country where monks still mattered, they have been ruled out. Yet is was a rare consolation to think that thousands of thousands of hermits could be meditating there, today, on the themes of the prajnaparamita. Even if it had only odious aspects, monasticism would still be worth more than any other ideal. Now more then ever, we should build monasteries … for those who believe in everything and for those who believe in nothing. Where to escape? There no longer exist a single place where we can professionally execrate this world.

Some grant programs are structured as competitions. New York City’s Industrial Growth Initiative, now in its second year, is a two-stage process that requires businesses to attend a growth workshop and then apply for a more in-depth workshop series covering topics like human resources and marketing. The program culminates with a business plan competition, where participants put what they have learned to work and create expansion plans to guide their next stage of growth. The plans are pitched to an audience of judges and business leaders, and three winners split a $150,000 prize. One recent winner was Eric Campione, chief administrative officer for P.A.C. Plumbing, Heating, & Air Conditioning. Mr. Campione submitted a plan to bring the third-generation family-owned business on Staten Island into the digital age with new technology, such as iPads for field technicians. It is about more than money, though.

If we possessed the facility to fully plumb the depths of the Creator’s thoughts, He would not be God, because God’s thoughts are beyond the range of human understanding—unimaginably far beyond anything we could ever imagine.

The logic of hell is nothing other than the logic of human free will, in so far as this is identical with freedom of choice. The theological argument runs as follows: “God, whose being is love, preserves our human freedom, for freedom is the condition of love. Although God’s love goes, and has gone, to the uttermost, plumbing the depth of hell, the possibility remains for each human being of a final rejection of God, and so of eternal life.” Let us gather some arguments against this logic of hell. The first conclusion, it seems to me, is that it is inhumane, for there are not many people who can enjoy free will where their eternal fate in heaven or hell is concerned. Anyone who faces men and women with the choice of heaven or hell, does not merely expect too much of them. It leaves them in a state of uncertainty, because we cannot base the assurance of our salvation on the shaky ground of our own decision. Is the presupposition of this logic of hell perhaps an illusion—the presupposition that it all depends on the human beings’ free will? The logic of hell seems to me not merely inhumane but also extremely atheistic: here the human being in his freedom of choice is his own lord and god. His own will is his heaven—or his hell. God is merely the accessory who puts that will into effect. If I decide for heaven, God must put me there; if I decide for hell, he has to leave me there. If God has to abide by our free decision, then we can do with him what we like. Is that “the love of God?” Free human beings forge their own happiness and are their own executioners. They do not just dispose over their lives here; they decide on their eternal destinies as well. So they have no need of any God at all. After God has perhaps created us free as we are, he leaves us to our fate. Carried to this ultimate conclusion, the logic of hell is secular humanism, as Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche already perceived a long time ago. The Christian doctrine of hell is to be found in the gospel of Christ’s descent into hell. In the crucified Christ we see what hell is, because through him it has been overcome. Judgment is not God’s last word. Judgment established in the world the divine righteousness on which the new creation is to be built. But God’s last word is “Behold I make all things new” (Rev 21: 5). From this no one is excluded. Love is God’s compassion with the lost. Transforming grace is God’s punishment for sinners. It is not the right to choose that defines the reality of human freedom. It is the doing of the good.

His Words plane along Surfaces that he no longer has the Stomach to plumb for Depth.

The blog just seemed to flesh out details of what they already knew, with the only revelation to carry genuine shock value being that an innocent abroad on her first tour had taken a remarkably short time to plumb the true depths of rock depravity in shagging a drummer.

This made her a quick pupil for anyone who had the nerve to tell her something really filthy or offensive. That was a double thrill for her—she could be shocked and amused at the same time. Smut was a surefire way of getting her to laugh. It would not be a natural, convivial sound, however, but a great, honking, nasal guffaw. The more offensive the joke, the more unattractive would be her reaction. She also enjoyed the shock she could achieve by repeating the worst from her collection. Needless to say, we did not plumb quite those depths on the first day. It took a week at least.

You need to retain a little bit of mystery along the way or he’s going to assume he’s already plumbed your depths and get bored really fast. Reveal yourself slowly, when the subject comes up, and let him build his opinion of you gradually. Not only does that make you more of an enigma that he’ll be dying to get to the bottom of, but it allows him to judge you on who you are right now. Let’s

Wyatt’s lips flatten into a serious line. His voice goes low, laced with passion. “Marrying one woman doesn’t mean spending your life with one woman, because the funny girl you fall in love with on a first date at twenty-eight eventually becomes the fascinating creature you propose to at thirty, then evolves into the stunning bride you wait for at the end of an aisle at thirty-two, and finally grows into the astounding mother to your children at thirty-four. By forty, she has blossomed into the businesswoman, the force to be reckoned with. By the time you’re fifty or sixty or seventy or a hundred, she’s been everything — your wife, your lover, your friend, your companion, your sous-chef, your travel partner, your life coach, your confidant, your cheerleader, your critic, your most stalwart advisor. She grows with you. She changes with you. She is always stable, but never stagnant. She is not one woman. She is a thousand versions of herself, a multitude of layers, an infinite ocean whose depths you plumb over a lifetime, whose many treasures and intricacies, quirks and idiosyncrasies you need an entire marriage to explore.” His voice softens. “A man should be so lucky to spend his life stuck with one woman such as that.” -Julie Johnson, "The Monday Girl

In studying the Holocaust together, we have plumbed the depths of the abyss that humanity is capable of, but not because of a fascination with evil and death; rather, it is because of the opposite, because of our commitment to humanity.

Drama is to life what ships are to the sea. A means to traverse it. To plumb its depths, breadth and beauty.

Because if you know the ways of man, the various conditions of his inquisitous mind, you will not be stumped by fear, guilt, avarice, grief, or remorse, and therefore, when the time comes, you will not hesitate to plumb the depths of the abyss and send out a resounding alarm to the unthinking masses, those who are willfully blind, warning them of the advancing army of the unresolved past.

Downstairs in the lounge, by the third pillar from the left, there sits an old lady with a sweet, placid spinsterish face, and a mind that has plumbed the depths of human iniquity and taken it as all in the day’s work. Her name’s Miss Marple.

How can you be faithful to following Jesus when the depths of what it means to follow Jesus are never plumbed?

The 2017-18 Broadway season offered a perfect example of the difference between the performative and psychological styles of acting in musicals. At the Shubert Theatre, veteran singer and comedienne Bette Midler returned to Broadway in a revival of Hello, Dolly!, a musical that demands above all star presence. To the delight of her fans, Midler played Bette Midler as Dolly. No one in the audience wanted her to be anyone else and the part didn’t demand the plumbing of psychological depth. A block away, young Ben Platt offered a powerful example of how a talented acting singer can create a believable character through speech and song in a musical. Platt’s performance in Dear Evan Hansen (Book, Steven Levenson; Music and lyrics, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul), has made him a star but Platt never breaks character, never acknowledges the audience. Ben Platt convincingly becomes Evan Hansen in both dialogue and song. Dear Evan Hansen is a post-Sondheim musical that demands intense acting as well as singing; Hello, Dolly! demands personality.

If the Cubs win the World Series, the playing of the sport must be discontinued. The leagues disbanded, the players sent home, the stadiums destroyed. Professional baseball really began with the team that became the Cubs. Early in the twentieth century, that team won and won and won and then, for whatever reason, stopped winning. They set of on a 108-year trek through the wilderness, plumbed the depths of defeat, then somehow found their way back. 2016 was 1908 all over again. The historic arc of the game could finally be recognized. It's a story that begins and ends in Chicago. If they won Game 7, that story would reach its obvious conclusion. Disband and go home. Anything beyond this point is postscript.

They were of her, but not her—a looking glass that reflected the possibility of what might or might not be, and she could not resist plumbing their depths as she sought to understand her own.

Train yourself to ignore the front that people display, the myth that surrounds them, and instead plumb their depths for signs of their character.

How would you like to live billions upon billions of lives?” Paul asked. “There’s a fabric of legends for you! Think of all those experiences, the wisdom they’d bring. But wisdom tempers love, doesn’t it? And it puts a new shape on hate. How can you tell what’s ruthless unless you’ve plumbed the depths of both cruelty and kindness?

He who has passed through this deepest and longest of the “dark nights” which precedes mature attainment can never again feel excessive emotional jubilation. The experience has been like a surgical operation in cutting him off from such enjoyments. Moreover, although his character will be serene always, it will be also a little touched by that melancholy which must come to one who not only has plumbed the depths of life’s anguish himself, but also has been the constant recipient of other people’s tales of sorrow.

The best part of being me is that everyone underestimates the depths of stupidity I’m willing to plumb in order to win out. Azrael

Plumb Line [10w] Poetry's a plumb line the gauge the depth of intellect.

was not through the childish fun and shallow pleasures of youth that a man and woman would become one soul and plumb the depths of intimacy. It was through mutual pain and suffering. It was in sharing hope in the midst of pain that they touched the very presence of God. You who fear Yahweh, praise him! All you Seed of Jacob, glorify him, and stand in awe of him, all you Seed of Israel! All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to Yahweh, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you. For kingship belongs to Yahweh, and he rules over the nations. His music melted her heart. Not through manipulation or artifice, but through truth. Because the way to capture the heart of a woman of God was to be a man after God’s own heart. He kissed her, as he had never kissed a woman before.

God has already pursued us with a love so totally overwhelming that it will take all of eternity to plumb its depths.

There’s no other way but work, work and work. Read widely, live wildly, plumb the depths of your­self, turn your­self inside out until you find your voice

Will we trust him? That’s the obvious question after God reveals himself to fearful people. Whose kingdom are you seeking? Do you trust the King who is also your Father? Dangers abound, and life is comprised of hourly risks, but the real issue behind worry is that of spiritual allegiances. Our answer? “Sort of…a little…usually.” We sort of want the kingdom, and we sort of want to trust the King—until life gets precarious. When everything is going well and the storehouses are full, we trust him. But when there is nothing for tomorrow, we panic and track down the address of another god who can give us enough for tomorrow and the next day too. Whom do I trust? Where is my faith? Those are the questions that all worriers must ask, yet all of us already know the answer. Our trust is divided. We don’t put all our eggs in one basket—even God’s—because that’s too risky. Our trust might not pay off the way we hope. We are reluctant to simply say to our Father, “I am yours,” and stop worrying. Jesus knows this. Fear and worry reveal that our faith is indeed small. If you are looking to plumb the depths of worry, you can find it in your mixed allegiances. You trust God for some things but not others. You trust him for heaven but not for earth. Edward T. Welch

Chiku felt something very close to vertigo, a dizzy sort of perception that she had only just begun to grasp the vertical depth of a very long life, the sense of how far it plumbed the past. A life that went down like a lift-shaft, each floor containing an ordinary life’s worth of love and loss, adventure and disappointment, dreams and ruins, joy and sorrow.

Running had become more of a competition to draw out the best that was in him, as if he were plumbing the depths of his will.

Then again, I was never any good at plumbing the depths of a woman's heart.

The time has come for women and men to band together to jointly create gender harmony. We must gather in mixed group to plumb new depths of relational awareness, courageous truth-telling, compassionate listening, empathic sensitivity, and mutual healing.

The surface level explanations of how things work, and the surface opinions and preferences, are created by the environment in which the person operates—like the waves on the surface of a lake. You’re not after these explanations, nor preferences or opinions. You’re interested in plumbing the depths to understand the currents flowing in her mind.

my ignorance has gained more light from interior prayer than from anything else, and that I have not reached by myself —it has been granted me by the mercy of God and the teaching of my starets. And that can be done by anyone. It costs nothing but the effort to sink down in silence into the depths of one's heart and call more and more upon the radiant name of Jesus. Everyone who does that feels at once the inward light, everything becomes understandable to him, he even catches sight in this light of some of the mysteries of the kingdom of God. And what depth and light there is in the mystery of a man coming to know that he has this power to plumb the depths of his own being, to see himself from within, to find delight in self- knowledge, to take pity on himself and shed tears of gladness over his fall and his spoiled will!

Marrying one woman doesn’t mean spending your life with one woman, because the funny girl you fall in love with on a first date at twenty-eight eventually becomes the fascinating creature you propose to at thirty, then evolves into the stunning bride you wait for at the end of an aisle at thirty-two, and finally grows into the astounding mother to your children at thirty-four. By forty, she has blossomed into the businesswoman, the force to be reckoned with. By the time you’re fifty or sixty or seventy or a hundred, she’s been everything — your wife, your lover, your friend, your companion, your sous-chef, your travel partner, your life coach, your confidant, your cheerleader, your critic, your most stalwart advisor. She grows with you. She changes with you. She is always stable, but never stagnant. She is not one woman. She is a thousand versions of herself, a multitude of layers, an infinite ocean whose depths you plumb over a lifetime, whose many treasures and intricacies, quirks and idiosyncrasies you need an entire marriage to explore.” His voice softens. “A man should be so lucky to spend his life stuck with one woman such as that.

Envisioning and organizing the [death camp Sonderkommandos] was National Socialism’s most diabolical crime…Through this institution, the attempt was made to shift the burden of guilt to others, that is, to the victims, so that not even the awareness that they were innocent was left to bring them relief. It is neither easy nor pleasant to plumb the depths of this evil, but I think it has to be done, because what was perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, and could involve us or our children. There is a temptation to turn away and to distract the mind: it is a temptation that must be resisted. In fact, the existence of the Sonderkommandos had a meaning and contained a message: ‘We, the Lord’s people, are your destroyers, but you are no better than us; if we want to, as we do, we are capable of destroying not only your bodies but also your souls, just as we have destroyed our own.

Personally, I have a great faith in the resiliency and adaptability of man, and I tend to look to our tomorrows with a surge of excitement and hope. I feel that we’re standing on the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating world in which the human tribe can become truly one family and man’s consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to roam the cosmos. I have a deep and abiding belief in man’s potential to grow and learn, to plumb the depths of his own being and to learn the secret songs that orchestrate the universe. We live in a transitional era of profound pain and tragic identity quest, but the agony of our age is the labor pain of rebirth.

Life sends us all pain and challenges that test us sorely and cause us to plumb our depths. Perhaps these difficult life events can also help us develop and strengthen parts of ourselves we never knew we had.

There’s a fabric of legends for you! Think of all those experiences, the wisdom they’d bring. But wisdom tempers love, doesn’t it? And it puts a new shape on hate. How can you tell what’s ruthless unless you’ve plumbed the depths of both cruelty and kindness?