Jay Michaelson Quotes

The Buddha’s dharma didn’t teach peace and relaxation; it taught awakening—often rude awakening.

All relaxation does is allow the truth to be felt. The mind is cleared, like a dirty window wiped clean, and the magnitude of what we might ordinarily take for granted inspires tears.

There’s no path to liberation that doesn’t pass through the shadow.

What a miracle, that all we have to do to be beautifully loving creatures is just relax and allow.

At the last stages of the journey, there’s no journey at all.

While [Bob] Dylan's folk fans thought he was selling out [in 1965-67], actually Dylan was lodging a stronger, deeper critique of American hypocrisy.

[Bob] Dylan would cut out phrases from magazines and then paste them together.

The best songs of this [modern] period - the apocalyptic "High Water," for example - return [Bob] Dylan to where he was in his first phase, updating and transforming American traditional music.

Except in these latter-day songs, [Bob] Dylan is a grizzled old prophet who's already been to hell and back.

[Bob] Dylan, like Johnny Cash and only a handful of others, simultaneously embodies the American dream and the harsh wake-up call that comes after it.

[Bob Dylan] is a preacher but also a sinner; a poet but also a pitchman; authentic all-American but also invented persona.

More of the symbols are stock (does [Bob] Dylan really have hogs lying out in the mud somewhere? I doubt it), but that's the point.

In late [Bob] Dylan, music is the key to immortality, even though the summer days are long gone.

In honor of his new Nobel, this hard-core Dylanophile wants to share with you a song or two from each of his many incarnations. Because you deserve to know.

Folk music had long been political but [Bob] Dylan's poetry took it to a new level.

In the meantime [1963-65], [Bob] Dylan was writing some of the best love songs in the genre, like "Girl From the North Country," "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," and "It Ain't Me, Babe."

[Bob] Dylan is a contemporary Don Quixote, at once besotted by the promise of America and yet also undermining it.

It is possible to refine awareness itself so much that the emptiness of things, and the role mental construction plays, becomes a directly apprehended reality.