Ira Gershwin Quotes

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state. Suffering can be likened to a baptism - the passing over the threshold of pain and grief and anguish to claim a new state of being.

Kabbalah is all about change. It isn't about being proud of our good qualities: the wisdom is about transforming our darkness into light.

A rebirth out of spiritual adversity causes us to become new creatures.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

We are created by being destroyed.

It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply.

The rain on my chest is a baptism - I'm born again.

If you die to everything you know,including your family,yourmemory,everything you have felt,then death is a purification,a rejuvenating process;then death brings innocence and it is only the innocent who are passionate, not the people who believe or who want to find out what happens after death.

You must submit to supreme suffering in order to discover the completion of joy.

I will burn, but this is a mere event. We shall continue our discussion in eternity.

I think if you believe in past lives, I must have been an extremely deprived being. I must have been mistreated, beaten, and forced into indentured servitude because this life has just been phenomenal.

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

In the life of the spirit there is no ending that is not a beginning.

I wouldn't have really committed myself to any kind of spiritual lifestyle, I don't think, if I had not endured great suffering. I think that's the case with a lot of people.

Suffering will get you great footage. I don't know about closer to God. Although there have been times when I've suffered to the point where I think I might be about to meet him.

He is not Brown any longer. He is an angel of light.

Love taught me to die with dignity that I might come forth anew in splendor. Born once of flesh, then again of fire, I was reborn a third time to the sound of my name humming haikus in heaven’s mouth.

Death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life.

We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world....No doubt pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. it removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of the rebel soul.

What hurts us is what heals us.

Most spiritual experiences begin with suffering. They begin with groundlessness. They begin when the rug has been pulled out from under us.

Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.

As iron put into the fire loseth its rust and becometh clearly red-hot, so he that wholly turneth himself unto God puts off all slothfulness, and is transformed into a new man.

The baptism of the spirit will do for you, what a phone booth did for Clark Kent, it will change you into a different being.