Has any music ever come as close to lifting the veil as Allegri's Miserere Mei? The sound one hears at time 4:48 (ironically the same number as in a much more modern, and in its own way much sadder work of art) in the video below seems to reach as close to the elusive sublime/divine (take your pick) as one could imagine. Little wonder that legend has Mozart "stealing" this music from the Vatican, after hearing it as a boy in the Sistine Chapel and then writing it down from memory.
We do not even have to worry about whether there is or isn't a God or Gods: let us just serve each other, and our own existence will be ensured - Dr R Neerunjun Gopee
We are working not with Thee but with him... We took from him what thou didst reject with scorn, that last gift he offered Thee, showing Thee all the kingdoms of the earth. We took from him Rome and the sword of Caesar, and proclaimed ourselves sole rulers of the earth... We shall triumph and shall be Caesars, and then we shall plan the universal happiness of man - The Brothers Karamazov, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Karamazov
The mistake the contemporary secularist makes is to think these humane, tolerant and liberal insights can easily be separated from their religious foundations. The folly of this idea can be seen both in the catastrophe of communism and in the progressive fantasies of secular liberalism. The point is that it is religion - if only in the very broad sense of an awareness of one's closeness to the unknown and the unknowable - that keeps one humble, modest and innoculated against utopian excesses - Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times, 25/03/06
The humanist sense of a gulf between ourselves and other animals is an aberration. Feeble as it is today, the feeling of sharing a common destiny with other living things is embedded in the human psyche. Those who struggle to conserve what is left of the natural environment are moved by the love of living things, biophilia, the frail bond of feeling that ties humankind to the Earth - John Gray, Straw Dogs
Humour distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals - Agnes Repplier
Contemporary humanism is a religion that lacks the insight into human frailty of traditional faiths - John Gray, http://www.markvernon.com/friendshiponline/dotclear/index.php?post/2009…
And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche