Peter Ackroyd Quotes

Trust in dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.

Mysticism, poor mysticism! When it is underestimated and oversimplified, it comes down from its original sphere and stands beside religion.

There is something more spiritual to us than what we are on this earth, but how you access it I'm not sure.

I think it's nice to let people know that there is an invisible part of the world. I think there are many people now who are interested in the invisible world.

There's a relationship between music and spirituality and inspiration and to a certain extent improvisation that draws me in, because I don't totally understand it. I know that those relationships have been telling me, since I started making records, where to go. What to write down.

Religion is among the most beautiful and most natural of all things - that religion which 'sees God in clouds and hears Him in the wind,' which endows every object of sense with a living soul, which finds in the system of nature whatever is holy, mysterious and venerable, and inspires the bosom with sentiments of awe and veneration.

I want to be taken out of our material world and experience something that is in another dimension.

I welcome the powers of the unknown.

I have friends who are scientists, strict materialists, who don't think science and religion are compatible, but I just think most of us - unless you're a strict atheist materialist, which there aren't many of - most of us believe in something outside the material world. And if you do believe that, I don't know how you're not obsessed with it.

Sufis were always spreading love with their music, and if some kind of extremism is a threat to it, it is a threat to all humanity.

I love the horror genre for how cinematic it is. I gravitated, I think, initially, toward the horror genre because, of all the genres, I think it is the genre that is most friendly to the subject matter of faith and belief in religion.

Amputechture' is my personal way of describing enlightenment, or just the celebration of this person who is a shaman and not a crazy person.

It's all about sensitivity. If you have sensitivity then mysticism will be part of your life.

Sufi music talks about connecting people. It talks about connecting hearts and connecting man with God. Everything that talks about connection is Sufi.

In music the mystical element is definitely there all the time, and one can see it.

It was so interesting, when [John Coltrane] created A Love Supreme. He had meditated that week. I almost didn't see him downstairs. And it was so quiet! There was no sound, no practice! He was up there meditating, and when he came down he said, "I have a whole new music!" He said, "There is a new recording that I will do, I have it all, everything." And it was so beautiful! He was like Moses coming down from the mountain. And when he recorded it, he knew everything, everything. He said this was the first time that he had all the music in his head at once to record.

Mysticism requires the notion of the unknowable, which is revealed to some and withheld from others; this divides men into those who feel guilt and those who cash in on it.

William Blake really is important, my cornerstone. Nobody ever told me before he did that childhood was such a damned serious business.

Music is the voice of God traveling through ten-dimensional hyperspace.

The only domain where the divine is visible is that of art, whatever name we choose to call it.

Listen to the unstruck sounds, and what sifts through that music.

Quantum mechanics, that brilliantly successful flagship theory of modern science, is deeply mysterious and hard to understand. Eastern mystics have always been deeply mysterious and hard to understand. Therefore, Eastern mystics must have been talking about quantum theory all along.

In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.

A dream is a telegram from the hidden world...Only a fool or an illiterate person ignores it.

God, the supreme being, is neither circumscribed by space, nor touched by time; he cannot be found in a particular direction, and his essence cannot change. The secret conversation is thus entirely spiritual; it is a direct encounter between God and the soul, abstracted from all material constraints.