The gods are fugitive guests of literature.
Roberto CalassoRead
Whatever else it might be, the divine is certainly the thing that imposes with maximum intensity the sensation of being alive.
Interpretation
The divine enhances the profound experience of life.
This quote by Roberto Calasso suggests that the concept of the divine brings a heightened awareness and intensity to our experience of being alive. It indicates that regardless of how one interprets the divine, it serves as a powerful force that amplifies our feelings and sensations, making life feel more vivid and meaningful.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about spirituality and its role in everyday life.
The gods are fugitive guests of literature.
We establish a connection with the unknown through the act of giving something and, paradoxically, the act of destroying something. That is what is behind sacrifice. What you offer and what you destroy, it is that surplus which is life itself.
Myth is never a single story. It is always a tree with many branches.
Stories never live alone; They are the branches of a family that we have to trace back, and forward.
The monster does not need the hero. it is the hero who needs him for his very existence. When the hero confronts the monster, he has yet neither power nor knowledge, the monster is his secret father who will invest him with a power and knowledge that can belong to one man only, and that only the monster can give.
Champagne had the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife.
Scholastic learning and polemical divinity retarded the growth of all true knowledge.
You say I have the most wicked face of any woman. You say my hair is like the serpent locks of Medusa, that my eyes have the cruel cunning of Borgia, that my mouth is the mouth of the sinister scheming Delilah, that my hands are like the talons of a Circe or the blood-bathing Elizabeth Bathory. And then you ask me of my soulβyou wish to know if it is reflected in my face.
I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age.
There have been innumerable Temporary Seekers after the Truth-have you ever heard of a permanent one?
War has been more common than peace, and extended periods of peace have been rare in a world divided into multiple states
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