Ecstatic Quotes

Looking at morning dew serenading on the petals of flowers is an ecstatic moment! This makes us realise that it is the simple pleasures of life that give us the most happiness! ~ Avijeet Das

Regular meditation opens the avenues of
intuitional knowledge,
makes the mind calm and steady,
awakens an ecstatic feeling,
and brings the practitioner in contact
with the source of his/her very being. ~ Sivananda

More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn't get any better than that. ~ Tom Robbins

She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! ~ Zora Neale Hurston

The first thing I notice is the sky, so full of blue and the kind of brilliant white clouds that make you ecstatic to have eyes. Nothing can go wrong under this sky ... ~ Jandy Nelson

Lenten practices of giving up pleasures are good reminders that the purpose of life is not pleasure. The purpose of life is to attain to perfect life, all truth and undying ecstatic love - which is the definition of God. In pursuing that goal we find happiness. Pleasure is not the purpose of anything; pleasure is a by-product resulting from doing something that is good. One of the best ways to get happiness and pleasure out of life is to ask ourselves, 'How can I please God?' and, 'Why am I not better?' It is the pleasure-seeker who is bored, for all pleasures diminish with repetition. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

I just started taking pictures, and it was - it was an instant love affair. It was just ecstatic. ~ Sally Mann

The soul should always stand ajar. ~ Emily Dickinson

Pink Balloons

My name is Olivia King

I am five years old

My mother bought me a balloon. I remember the day she walked through the front door with it. The curly hot pink ribbon trickling down her arm, wrapped around her wrist. She was smiling at me as she untied the ribbon and wrapped it around my hand.

"Here Livie, I bought this for you."

She called me Livie.

I was so happy. I'd never had a balloon before. I mean, I always saw balloon wrapped around other kids wrist in the parking lot of Wal-Mart, but I never dreamed I would have my very own.

My very own pink balloon.

I was excited! So ecstatic! So thrilled! I couldn't believe my mother bought me something! She'd never bought me anything before! I played with it for hours. It was full of heliu and it danced and swayed and floated as I drug it around from room to room with me, thinking of places to take it. Thinking of places the balloon had never been before. I took it in the bathroom, the closet, the laundry room, the kitchen, the living room. I wanted my new best friend to see everything I saw! I took it to my mother's bedroom!

My mothers

Bedroom?

Where I wasn't supposed to be?

With my pink

balloon...

I covered my ears as she screamed at me, wiping the evidence off her nose! She slapped me across the face as she told me how bad I was! How much I misbehaved! How I never ~ Colleen Hoover

The paradox is that by being 'in love' we are in fact falling in love with ourselves, and we have an opportunity to see ourselves in the eyes of another. It is an ecstatic place to be, the dance of romantic love, and one that cannot be denied, for it is the place where we are most likely to experience a divine tango with our soul. Love and myth go hand in hand, for myth is the most exquisite mirror of all for the reflection of self. ~ Sarah Bartlett

FORM IS ECSTATIC

There is a shimmering excitement in being sentient and shaped. The

caravan master sees his camels lost in it, nose to tail, as he himself is,

his friend, and the stranger coming toward them. A gardener watches the

sky break into song, cloud wobbly with what it is. Bud, thorn, the same.

Wind, water, wandering this essential state. Fire, ground, gone. That's

how it is with the outside. Form is ecstatic. Now imagine the inner:

soul, intelligence, the secret worlds!
And don't think the garden loses its

ecstasy in winter. It's quiet, but the roots are down there rioutous.

If someone bumps you in the street, don't be angry. Everyone careens

about in this surprise. Respond in kind. Let the knots untie, turbans

be given away. Someone drunk on this could drink a donkeyload a night.

Believer, unbeliever, cynic, lover, all combine in the spirit-form we are,

but no one yet is awake like Shams. ~ Rumi

Prince Myshkin in The Idiot:
'He was thinking, incidentally, that there was a moment or two in his epileptic condition almost before the fit itself (if it occurred in waking hours) when suddenly amid the sadness, spiritual darkness and depression, his brain seemed to catch fire at brief moments ... His sensation of being alive and his awareness increased tenfold at those moments which flashed by like lightning. His mind and heart were flooded by a dazzling light. All his agitation, doubts and worries, seemed composed in a twinkling, culminating in a great calm, full of understanding ... but these moments, these glimmerings were still but a premonition of that final second (never more than a second) with which the seizure itself began. That second was, of course, unbearable. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

She felt the essence of herself pulled finer and smaller like those streams of spun glass that pull and stretch till there remains but a glimmering illusion. Neither falling nor breaking, the stream spins finer. She felt herself very small and ecstatic. Alabama was in love. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

Shelby looked over to see Andrew silently mouthing syllables to himself, as if he were part of an ecstatic rite. He grinned as he bit fricatives and tongued plosives. He was tasting English origins, mulling over words ripped from bronze-smelling hoards. Words that had slept beneath centuries of dust and small rain, sharp and bright as scale mail. Poetry had never moved her quite so much as drama. She loved the shock of colloquy, the beat and treble of words doing what they had to on stage. Andrew preferred the echo of poems buried alive. ~ Bailey Cunningham

Are you looking for me?
I am in the next seat.
My shoulder is against yours.
you will not find me in the stupas,
not in Indian shrine rooms,
nor in synagogues,
nor in cathedrals:
not in masses,
nor kirtans,
not in legs winding around your own neck,
nor in eating nothing but vegetables.
When you really look for me,
you will see me instantly
you will find me in the tiniest house of time.
Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?
He is the breath inside the breath. ~ Kabir

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

The choice, though, is not between scrupulous obedience and ecstatic abandon. The choice runs right down the middle. If you really want to know how to fly, you need to know how to walk. ~ Michael Lesy

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan. ~ Erica Jong

The audience was ecstatic, leaving the big top with smiles that wouldn't fade for hours. They had seen what they thought were tricks, not realizing everything about this circus was real. ~ Sarah Noffke

One of my favorite things in books is watching someone make the mistake. You know it's going to happen. You keep thinking: 'Don't do it!' But of course they're going to do it. It's riveting. You learn through them that it's okay. It's the ecstatic fall, where you watch someone make that terrible decision, and there's such pleasure in it. ~ Holly Black

I do not wish to grow old, to outlive my illusions. Only a short respite from cares and sorrow, a brief time of flowers, and music, and love, and laughter, and ecstatic tears. ~ Anne Reeve Aldrich

The Unavailable Available Pattern." It's where you convince yourself (and others) that you are available for relationship, but you always find a way to stop short. That stopping short can manifest in many ways: choosing unavailable people, looking for excuses to run, focusing on a lover's imperfections rather than their appealing qualities, getting lost in the excitement of ecstatic possibility until the first glimpse of real vulnerability sends you packing. It's the addiction to possibility and the fear of intimacy all rolled into one. ~ Jeff Brown

When an ecstatic is asked the question, What is it that love dares the self to do? she will answer: Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty. ~ Anne Carson

I was an aesthete rather than an athlete, and my only wish was to be an ecstatic wanderer. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

My nominee for Best Picture of the year - maybe the best picture ever, because it's essentially made up of and is an ecstatic love letter to all other movies - is Christian Marclay's endlessly enticing must-see masterpiece 'The Clock.' ~ Jerry Saltz

I want this; I want you, Ember. But tonight is about you, not us. You needed this, and I'm fucking ecstatic to give it to you, but we're not doing this." He pushed his hips against my ass, and I groaned, wanting him inside me. "Until it's about us, and no one else. ~ Rebecca Yarros

There is a supernal intelligence behind sexual arousal, the true purpose of which is to create for us ecstatic experiences of our own divinity. ~ John Maxwell Taylor

I think I was just so ecstatic that I was working, and then as it went on, you know, I started to really appreciate that it was good [show "Freaks and Geeks" ] and that we were doing something a little different and that, you know, everyone was really cool to work with and that it was really talented group of people, and it was just when I was realizing that, that it got canceled. ~ Seth Rogen

The universe is neither friendly nor hostile. It is merely indifferent. This makes me ecstatic. ~ Sebastian Horsley

I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them their "divine, magical, and ecstatic" existence. ~ Clyde S. Kilby

There was something religious in grandmother's face, not in any sanctimoniously devout or ecstatic sense,but a look full of religious feeling, serenity and resignation. ~ Anatoli Rybakov

It is in the giving up of self that human beings can find the most ecstatic and lasting, solid, durable joy of life. And it is death that provides life with all its meaning. This "secret" is the central wisdom of religion. The process of giving up the self (which is ~ M. Scott Peck

Greatness of soul is available to people who do not have the luxury of being ecstatic about the condition and appearance of their bodies. ~ John Ortberg

Because I Cannot Sleep

Because I cannot sleep
I make music at night.
I am troubled by the one
whose face has the color of spring flowers.
I have neither sleep nor patience,
neither a good reputation nor disgrace.
A thousand robes of wisdom are gone.
All my good manners have moved a thousand miles away.
The heart and the mind are left angry with each other.
The stars and the moon are envious of each other.
Because of this alienation the physical universe
is getting tighter and tighter.
The moon says, 'How long will I remain
suspended without a sun?'
Without Love's jewel inside of me,
let the bazaar of my existence be destroyed stone by stone.
O Love, You who have been called by a thousand names,
You who know how to pour the wine
into the chalice of the body,
You who give culture to a thousand cultures,
You who are faceless but have a thousand faces,
O Love, You who shape the faces
of Turks, Europeans, and Zanzibaris,
give me a glass from Your bottle,
or a handful of being from Your Branch.
Remove the cork once more.
Then we'll see a thousand chiefs prostrate themselves,
and a circle of ecstatic troubadours will play.
Then the addict will be freed of craving.
and will be resurrected,
and stand in awe till Judgement Day ~ Rumi

They say love is all about raging hormones. For me, it's mind's way of breaking through its self-imposed limitations in order to set the eternally ecstatic soul free. ~ Saurabh Sharma

I tell you, to be drunk on alcohol is disgraceful, but to be drunk on water is noble and ecstatic. ~ Yann Martel

My ice-cream is melting just as quickly as Danny's and is dripping down my chin, across my wrist, and onto my thigh. I laugh, throwing my head back and covering my eyes so as not to be blinded by happiness, and it is in this moment of weightlessness that I am suddenly aware of the lightest touch on my skin, like the wings of a butterfly. It flutters against my thigh then lingers on my wrist, but before its delicate wings reach my face, I force my eyes open and see only fragments: pink lips, a tanned cheek, the features and lines of a face silhouetted against the bright sunlight. My nostrils draw in his scent for the very first time and it is so strong that he is not just next to me but intimately close. His smell instantly takes me prisoner, overpowering me to such an extent that I have forgotten who and where I am.
I know that, moments before, Alex was using his lips and tongue to clean the melted ice-cream off my thigh and wrist and inadvertently treating me to the most ecstatic experience of my life. My body and mind are adrift in a sea of bliss, the sounds of the park suddenly fade away, and the world and everyone in it cease to exist. All I can see is a blindingly bright light and all I can feel are a man's moist lips touching mine. Alex's hot, passionate mouth is kissing me greedily as if there is finally enough air; as if he had been suffocating, but now he can breathe.
I know that a kiss like this is neither flirting nor dating and can sense with every fibr ~ Victoria Sobolev

I also just get so ecstatic hearing and feeling the noise in general and it still makes me giggle inside playing certain sounds. One of the downsides is that in order to produce certain sounds, I'm totally using my arms the wrong way and sometimes that worries me. But then that physical strain puts me in a different state of mind to bring out different dimensions in the music, I suppose. ~ Okkyung Lee

I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master ... The quality that had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live. ~ C.S. Lewis

If you were to succeed in prolonging the deliriously ecstatic puppy-dog love stage of the first months of courtship through-out the entire relationship itself-through marriage, unto death-would this same love, so celebrated, so sought after, break down in utter incredulity at the duration of its own existence? ~ Courtney Maum

In that weekly ecstatic keeping of faith and bearing of witness, Delia fell in love with singing. Singing was something that might make sense of a person. Singing might make more sense of life than living had to start with. ~ Richard Powers

Listen," Kirillov stopped, gazing before him with fixed, ecstatic eyes. "Listen to a big idea: There was one day on earth, and in the middle of the earth stood three crosses. One on a cross believed so much that he said to another: 'This day you will be with me in paradise.' They day ended, they both died, went, and did not find either paradise or resurrection. What had been said would not prove true. Listen: this man was the highest on all the earth, he constituted what it was to live for. Without this man the whole planet with everything on it is--madness only. There has not been one like Him before or since, not ever, even to the point of miracle. This is the miracle, that there has not been and never will be such a one. And if so, if the laws of nature did not pity even This One, did not pity even their own miracle, but made Him, too, live amidst a lie and die for a lie, then the whole planet is a lie, and stands upon a lie and a stupid mockery. Then the very laws of the planet are a lie and a devil's vaudeville. Why live then, answer me, if you're a man. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

there's no way I can sleep in any position with so much still unwritten about the glory of basements, where,
with all the promise in crock pot boxes, small animals go to die, piles of laundry hide the machines, rusted tools fall into other rusted tools giving way to unsung sculpture, soiled playing cards and unmatched socks strewn atop a punched-out screen door make a shaggy parquet; and a famished, leggy fluorescent tube barely winks on the entire scene. ~ Kristen Henderson

Just as someone in pain is linked by his groans to the present moment (and is entirely outside past and future), so someone bursting out in such ecstatic laughter is without memory and desire, for he is emitting his shout into the world's present moment and wishes to know only that. ~ Milan Kundera

Pain and grief have been kept buried for ages, bred in secrecy and shame, wrapped by an ongoing conspiracy of smiles and well-being. Pain and grief are most healing and ecstatic emotions. Yes, sure, they can be hard, yet what makes them most devastating is the perverted idea that they are wrong, that they need to be hidden and fixed. The greatest perversion I can conceive is the idea that illness and pain are a sign that there is something wrong in our life, that we have unresolved issues, that we have made mistakes. In this world everyone is bound to get ill, experience pain and die. The greatest gift I can give to myself and the world is the joyful acceptance of this. Today I want to be real, I will not hide my pain as well as my happiness. I will not care if my gloomy face or desperate words cause concern or embarrassment in others. I do not need be fed with reassuring words about the beauty of life. The beauty of life resides in the full acceptance of All That Is. ~ Franco Santoro

Embracing the Light
Collected bits of truth
Shimmering sparks
Shards of light
Merge
Healing
Restoring
Bursting Bright
Rising
in divine ecstatic flame. ~ Leonard Nimoy

He climbed ecstatic mountains and floundered in the rocky darkness between the peaks. ~ John Steinbeck

The idea of grace had been so much on my mind, grace as a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials. ~ Marilynne Robinson

I've never taken drugs - if you take a drug of your choice, you get some ecstatic feeling. ~ Michael Caine

What if more women, mothers, gave birth as an ecstatic celebration of female sexuality? Mothers who do will often declare, "Now I can do anything!" What would the world look like if half of our population felt empowered to make a difference with their lives? ~ Jeannine Parvati Baker

What we often feel in ecstatic moments in this world - 'I don't ever want this to stop' - will be the constant thought of our hearts in that world. We shall think it, knowing that in fact it never WILL stop. ~ J.I. Packer

Drugs have a long history of use in magic in various cultures, and usually in the context of either ecstatic communal rituals or in personal vision quests. However compared to people in simple pastoral tribal situations most people in developed countries now live in a perpetual state of mental hyperactivity with overactive imaginations anyway, so throwing drugs in on top of this usually just leads to confusion and a further loss of focus.
Plus as the real Shamans say, if you really do succeed in opening a door with a drug it will thereafter open at will and most such substances give all they will ever give on the first attempt. ~ Peter J. Carroll

When movement becomes ecstatic, then this is dance. When the movement is so total there is no ego, then it is dance. ~ Rajneesh

I see. And who is this author?"
"Neil Fucking Gaiman."
"His second name is Fucking?"
"No, Leif, that's the honorary second name all celebrities are given by their fans. It's not an insult, it's a huge compliment, and he's earned it. You'd like him. He dresses all in black like you. Read a couple of his books, and then when you meet him, you'll squee too."
Leif found the suggestion distasteful. "I would never behave with so little dignity. Nor would I wish to be confronted in such a manner by anyone else. Vampires inspire screams, not squees. Involuntary urination is common, I grant, but it properly flows from a sense of terror, not an ecstatic sense of hero worship. ~ Kevin Hearne

I physically need to make art. Art isn't just a hobby for me. It's not something that I like. It's an intense passion, an ecstatic love affair, with as much turmoil, frustration, exasperation and need as a forbidden liaison. ~ Sarah Lacy

Yoga is the journey from just eating and sleeping to becoming an ecstatic being. This is the aspiration of life itself. ~ Jaggi Vasudev

For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy. ~ Emily Dickinson

The male sphere of Norse shamanism consisted of the elite warrior groups known as the berserkir ("bear-shirts") and the úlfheðnar ("wolf-skins"). The berserkers (as we'll refer to the members of both of those groups for the sake of convenience), were shamans of a very different sort. After undergoing a period of rigorous training and initiation, they developed the ability to fight in an ecstatic trance that rendered them fearless - and, according to some sources, impervious to danger - while nevertheless inspiring a tremendous amount of fear in their opponents by their behavior, which was
at once animalistic and otherworldly. Perhaps needless to say, there was no ergi associated with being a berserker. Quite the opposite, in fact - the berserker was seen as something of a model of manliness. ~ Daniel McCoy

This was the joy that the world sought
sacred and pagan all at once. A union between two dissimilars into a seamless one. A picture of love and deep satisfaction. An ecstatic glimpse of the beatific vision. ~ Sylvain Reynard

I believe in a passionately strong feeling for the poetry of life - for the beautiful, the mysterious, the romantic, the ecstatic - the loveliness of Nature, the lovability of people, everything that excites us, everything that starts our imagination working, LAUGHTER, gaiety, strength, heroism, love, tenderness, every time we see - however dimly - the godlike that is in everyone and want to kneel in reverence. ~ Leopold Stokowski

Drink," he said.
I pressed my mouth to the wound, first lapping up the blood as it flowed out, and then sucking deeply from it. I had only tasted blood a few times before, when I had sucked on an injured fingertip. The blood I now imbibed was nothing like the mild, slightly salty liquid that ran in my own veins. Dracula's blood was delicious. It tasted like a deep, rich, full-bodied wine, with a dark, delectable tang. It was ambrosia; I felt as if I could not get enough of it. As I drank, I heard him give an ecstatic little moan. His hand cradled the back of my head and held it there, urging me to continue, while his other hand found and clasped both my hands lovingly in his. ~ Syrie James

But I still read Shaw on a regular basis. What I love is the nakedness of the polemic and the irresistible good humour. For me, 'Major Barbara' is the greatest of all the plays in that it starts from the rational and proceeds to the ecstatic in a spectacular way, and leaves you very confused if you cling to Euclidean logic. ~ Tony Kushner

I have never described the time I was in Doctor Who as anything except a kind of ecstatic success, but all the rest has been rather a muddle and a disappointment. Compared to Doctor Who, it has been an outrageous failure really - it's so boring. ~ Tom Baker

One of the most painful stages in the twin flame relationship is that of the "runner and chaser" dynamic. After the initial stages of ecstatic union and fairy-tale partnership, things start to heat up. Egos begin to clash, core wounds, insecurities, and traumas are rubbed raw, and shadow selves lash out. As a result, it's inevitable that almost every twin flame relationship will battle through drama and dysfunction at first. ~ Aletheia Luna

Her childhood had been magical, hours spent in ecstatic loneliness in the apple orchard, dreaming of foreign lands and wild adventures. Everything was new, down to bird song and grass blades. By the time she had reached adulthood, the town around her was like a grandmother who had used up all her stories and now simply rocked on the porch. The same flowers, the same streets, year after year. She longed for someone more exotic. A prince. A pirate. ~ Kathy Hepinstall

If you would be thrilled by watching the galloping advance of a major glacier, you'd be ecstatic watching changes in publishing. ~ John D. MacDonald

You'll have to keep it up for longer than that, if you expect ecstatic moans," I answered. "Two minutes doesn't deserve any more than a giggle. ~ Diana Gabaldon

Anger, greed. Whatsoever else you name, are not solid; they are just the absence of a blissful, ecstatic life. ~ Osho

I'm different than most people ... when I cross the finish line of a big race, I see that people are ecstatic, but I'm thinking about what I'm going to do tomorrow. It's as If my Journey is everlasting and there is no finish line ~ David Goggins

Cannabis is renowned as a powerful hallucinogen in large doses, and certainly capable of inducing profound ecstatic ecstatic states. Anyone who who doubts this has clearly not experienced its effects. ~ John Rush

I had just got back from skiing, and I was just hanging out, browsing the Internet, and I found some article that was a press release that said slope style was gonna be included in the Olympics. And the first thing I did was call up my coach Mike Hanley, and we were ecstatic. ~ Nick Goepper

God is not ecstatic about the lack you are experiencing; He is not delightful over your failures, He is not happy about your stagnancy. ~ Jaachynma N.E. Agu

Protestantism includes every type of religious thought and organization from 'high church' Anglicanism to high-principled Quakerism, from ecstatic Methodism to relentlessly intellectual Unitarism. Only slowly, and with many pangs is even Protestantism shaking off the religion about Christ. ~ Lewis Browne

Although we tend to think about saints as holy and pious, and picture them with halos above their heads and ecstatic gazes, true saints are much more accessible. They are men and women like us, who live ordinary lives and struggle with ordinary problems. What makes them saints is their clear and unwavering focus on God and God's people. ~ Henri Nouwen

Mental life consists, according to the textbooks, of thought and feeling, according to the poets, of addressing an inner voice (or voices), and according to the dramatists, of internal monologues. In my experience however it consists mainly of intermittent silences, and humming. Humming accompanies habitual and semi-automatic activities, as well as stoppages. Humming accompanies a sort of incomplete concentration on oneself. Humming is characteristic of psychological states in which we are not exactly miserable, and states in which we are not exactly ecstatic. Which amounts I think to more or less always. ~ Miroslav Holub

Here's what I think I'm having trouble with: this is what happiness is. When I was a kid, I thought I'd just get happier and happier as I got older, and have more things to be happy about. I based this theory on observation of select adults. The problem with my results is that I couldn't tell the difference then between happy and fake-happy. Now I know you pretend to be just frigging ecstatic over everything, maybe because you're so glad it's not worse. ~ Emma Bull

Numbers are eternal while everything else is perishable; they are of the nature not of matter, but of mind; they permit mental operations of the most surprising and delightful kind without reference to the coarse external world of the senses-which is how the divine mind must be supposed to operate. The ecstatic contemplation of geometrical forms and mathematical laws is therefore the most effective means of purging the soul of earthly passion, and the principle link between man and divinity. ~ Arthur Koestler

Just one thing gives me hope, and that is the steady trickle of emails I receive on the subject from children, ecstatic with delight at the stupidity of their teachers:

I'd like to submit to Bad Science my teacher who gave us a handout which says that 'Water is best absorbed by the body when provided in frequent small amounts.' What I want to know is this. If I drink too much in one go, will it leak out of my arsehole instead?

'Anton', 2006

Thank you Anton. ~ Ben Goldacre

He was alone in the doorway, digging the street. Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness
everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being. ~ Jack Kerouac

Do you think it's a coincidence that college is when many Americans do their most serious fucking and falling-down drinking and generally ecstatic DIonysian-type reveling? It's not. ~ David Foster Wallace

Peace is wonderful, but / ecstatic dance is more fun / and less narcissistic ~ Rumi

Mozart's mental grip never loosens; he never abandons himself to any one sense; even at his most ecstatic moments his mind is vigorous, alert, and on the wing. He dives unerringly on to his finest ideas like a bird of prey, and once an idea is seized he soars off again with an undiminished power. ~ Walter J. Turner

Of all the misconceptions about love the most powerful and pervasive is the belief that "falling in love" is love or at least one of the manifestations of love. It is a potent misconception, because falling in love is subjectively experienced in a very powerful fashion as an experience of love. When a person falls in love what he or she certainly feels is "I love him" or "I love her."
But two problems are immediately apparent. The first is that the experience of falling in love is specifically a sex-linked erotic experience. We do not fall in love with our children even though we may love them very deeply. We do not fall in love with our friends of the same sex-unless we are homosexually oriented-even though we may care for them greatly. We fall in love only when we are consciously or unconsciously sexually motivated. The second problem is that the experience of falling in love is invariably temporary. No matter whom we fall in love with, we sooner or later fall out of love if the relationship continues long enough. This is not to say that we invariably cease loving the person with whom we fell in love. But it is to say that the feeling of ecstatic lovingness that characterizes the experience of falling in love always passes. The honeymoon always ends. The bloom of romance always fades. ~ M. Scott Peck

I've been sleeping through my life Now I'm waking up And I want to stand in the sunshine I have never been ecstatic Had a flower but it never bloomed In the darkness of my wasted youth It was hiding in the shadows Learning to become invisible Uncover me ~ Juliana Hatfield

If people become ecstatic the whole society will have to change, because this society is based on misery. If people are blissful you cannot lead them to war
to Vietnam, or to Egypt, or to Israel. No. Someone who is blissful will just laugh and say: This is nonsense! ~ Rajneesh

If you look at yourself right now, sometimes the outside situations decide what kind of person you are, isn't it? Right now, if someone in front of you acts nasty, you will act nastier than him. Not necessarily, just an example, okay? (Laughter). Somebody gets angry with you, you get angry with him. Sometimes your chemistry takes over, sometimes your hormones take over, something else takes over, so many forces are ruling you in a compulsive way. These moments you are not really a human being. You are many things in human form.

There are certain moments when you are very conscious, when you are fully aware of what you are doing, only in those moments do you truly function as a human being. If you were fully aware and conscious of what you are doing with this moment, the way you function in this world and within yourself would be very different, isn't it? If you were very consciously creating every process of life in you, you would definitely make yourself into a very blissful and ecstatic being. Whenever you are in a state where you are very happy and joyful, you are a wonderful person for everybody around you. ~ Sadhguru

Sometimes, the only cost to experience an ecstatic moment is a decision ~ Jacinta Mpalyenkana

The witness is frequent and insistent that God is inherently relational and personal. So God cannot be either received or understood apart from our being personal and realtional as well. That most emphatically excludes the detached intellect as a way of knowing God. It excludes programmatic work as a way of knowing God. It excludes cultivation of the ecstatic and visionary as a way of knowing God. God is not an abstract idea that can be mastered, not an impersonal force that can be used, not a private experience that can be indulged." Eugene Peterson, "Living the Resurrection" (106). ~ Eugene H. Peterson

The refusal to feel takes a heavy toll. Not only is there an impoverishment of our emotional and sensory life, flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstaticâ but this psychic numbing also impedes our capacity to process and respond to information. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies. ~ Joanna Macy

Real-life may not always be a symphony of buoyant instants or ecstatic exploits. Downbeat emotional externalities can emerge unpredictably throughout our life journey. If we wish to turn life into an undying dance prom, let's keep one foot in reality for sure. ("Blind date") ~ Erik Pevernagie

To share out your soul freely, that is what metanoia (a change of mind, or repentance)really refers to: a mental product of love. A change of mind, or love for the undemonstrable. And you throw off every conceptual cloak of self-defense, you give up the fleshly resistance of your ego. Repentance has nothing to do with self-regarding sorrow for legal transgressions. It is an ecstatic erotic self-emptying. A change of mind about the mode of thinking and being. ~ Christos Yannaras

The ecstatic beauty and soulful grace of Rumi's poetry inspires human hearts to believe in possibilities beyond the predictably fatal. ~ Aberjhani

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware. ~ Thomas Hardy

A mother does not become pregnant in order to provide employment to medical people. Giving birth is an ecstatic jubilant adventure not available to males. It is a woman's crowning creative experience of a lifetime. ~ John Stevenson

I am extremely ecstatic about the presidency of Barack Obama. I think he is paving the way for young African-American men like myself. I have very high expectations for Obama, and I am extremely hopeful that he will bring great lasting change not just to America, but to the entire world. ~ Texas Battle

When, shortly afterward, I stopped at the top of the hill and saw the town beneath me, my feeling of happiness was so ecstatic that I didn't know how I would be able to make it home, sit there and write, eat, or sleep. But the world is constructed in such a way that it meets you halfway in moments precisely like these, your inner joy seeks an outer counterpart and finds it, it always does, even in the bleakest regions of the world, for nothing is as relative as beauty. Had the world been different, in my opinion, without mountains and oceans, plains and seas, deserts and forests, and consisted of something else, inconceivable to us, as we don't know anything other than this, we would also have found it beautiful. A world with gloes and raies, evanbillits and conulames, for example, or ibitera, proluffs, and lopsits, whatever they might be, we would have sung their praises because that is the way we are, we extol the world and love it although it's not necessary, the world is the world, it's all we have. So as I walked down the steps toward the town center on this Wednesday at the end of August I had a place in my heart for everything I beheld. A slab of stone worn smooth in a flight of steps: fantastic. A swaybacked roof side by side with an austere perpendicular brick building: so beautiful. A limp hot-dog wrapper on a drain grille, which the wind lifts a couple of meters and then drops again, this time on the pavement flecked with white stepped-on chewing gum: incredible. A ~ Knausgaard, Karl Ove

Ecstatic Love is an ocean, and the Milky Way is a flake of foam floating on it. ~ Rumi

Our culture, self-toxified by the poisonous by-products of technology and egocentric ideology, is the unhappy inheritor of the dominator attitude that alteration of consciousness by the use of plants or substances is somehow wrong, onanistic, and perversely antisocial. I will argue that suppression of shamanic gnosis, with its reliance and insistence on ecstatic dissolution of the ego, has robbed us of life's meaning and made us enemies of the planet, of ourselves, and our grandchildren. We are killing the planet in order to keep intact the wrongheaded assumptions of the ego-dominator cultural style. ~ Terence McKenna

Beyond these models of reconciliation, a theology of mysticism provides some hope for common ground between Christianity and Islam. Both religions have within their histories examples of ecstatic union with God, which seem at odds with their own spiritual traditions but have much in common with each other. ~ Tony Campolo

She's had a long life. Now she's going to the Lord."
"Frankly it creeps me out a little when you say things like that," Simon said.
"It shouldn't. If you don't like 'Lord,' pick another word. She's going home. She's going back to the party. Whatever you like."
"I suppose you have some definite ideas about an afterlife."
"Sure. We get reabsorbed into the earthly and celestial mechanism."
"No heaven?"
"That's heaven."
"What about realms of glory? What about walking around in golden slippers?"
"We abandon consciousness as if we were waking from a bad dream. We throw it off like clothes that never fit us right. It's an ecstatic release we're physically unable to apprehend while we're in our bodies. Orgasm is our best hint, but it's crude and minor by comparison. ~ Michael Cunningham