I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams.
It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to loses it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.
Like those great sphinxes lounging through eternity in noble attitudes upon the desert sand, they gaze incuriously at nothing, calm and wise.
I walked in a desert.
And I cried,
‘Ah, God, take me from this place!’
A voice said, ‘It is no desert.’
I cried, ‘Well, But -
The sand, the heat, the vacant horizon.’
A voice said, ‘It is no desert.’
If this practice [of totalitarianism] is compared with […] [the desert] of tyranny, it seems as if a way had been found to set the desert itself in motion, to let loose a sand storm that could cover all parts of the inhabited earth.
The conditions under which we exist today in the field of politics are indeed threatened by these devastating sand storms.
People find beauty in the desert. I don't know where they're looking because I haven't found it. It's ugly. It's nasty. It's dirt. It's desert. It's sand. It's rock. It's cactus. It's lizards and snakes.
We are, always, reminded of the old saw: What would happen if the Soviet Union took over the Sahara Desert? Answer: Nothing for 50 years. After that there would be a shortage of sand.
I always thought that people who live in the desert are a little crazy. It could be that the desert attracts that kind of person, or that after living there, you become that. It doesn't make much difference. But now I've done my 40 years in the desert.
Every ripple on the ocean, every leaf on every tree, every sand dune in the desert, every power we never see.
I heard about desert, but I never seen them with my eyes. I just couldn't believe there was nothing, except sand and except the stars in the sky.
I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sku was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.
I always thought the desert was the antithesis of peace - something that attacks you. So you don't go to the desert for peace.
Over the summit, I saw the so-called Mono desert lying dreamily silent in the thick, purple light -- a desert of heavy sun-glare beheld from a desert of ice-burnished granite.
When does gold ore become gold? When it is put through a process of fire. So the human being during the training becomes as pure as gold through suffering. It is the burning away of the dross. Suffering has a great redeeming quality. As a drop of water failing on the desert sand is sucked up immediately, so we must become nothing and nowhere ... we must disappear.
When, in 1913, in a desperate attempt to rid art of the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the form of the square... the critics... sighed, "All that we loved has been lost. We are in a desert"... But the desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling.
The knowledge that refuge is available, when and if needed, makes the silent inferno of the desert more easily bearable. Mountains complement desert as desert complements city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization.
How are we to live with the desert, in the desert, within the desert?