Taking Care of the Details

"To study the self is to forget the self.  To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things."
-  Zen Master Dogen

"The more we understand individual things, the more we understand God."
-  Benedict De Spinoza

"God is in the details."
-  Mies Van Der Rohe

"After understanding thousands of the details, a common variety God is really superfluous."
-  Mike Garofalo

"Caress the detail, the divine detail."
-  Vladimir Nabokov

"Details are all there are."
-  Maezumi Roshi

"We think in generalities, but we live in details."
-  W.H. Auden

"If you take care of the little things, the big things take care of themselves."
-  R. Reese

"We work with the stuff of the soul by means of the things of life."
-  Thomas Moore

"Pay attention to minute particulars. Take care of the little ones. Generalization and abstraction are the plea of the hypocrite, scoundrel, and knave."
-  William Blake

"The object of our lives is to look at, listen to, touch, taste things.  Without them, these sticks, stones, feathers, shells - there is no Deity."
-  R. H. Blyth, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics , p. 144.

"When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing but things."
-  Alan Watts, The Way of Zen, p 131

"Do things noncoercively (wuwei),
Be non-interfering in going about your business (wushi),
And savor the flavor of the unadulterated in what you eat.
Treat the small as great and the few as many.
Requite enmity with character (de).
Take account of the difficult while it is still easy,
And deal with the large while it is still tiny.  
The most difficult things in the world originate with the easy,
And the largest issues originate with the tiny.
Thus, it is because the sages never try to do great things
That they are indeed able to be great.
One who makes promises lightly is sure to have little credibility;
One who finds everything easy is certain to have lots of difficulties.
Thus, it is because even the sages pay careful attention to such things
That they are always free of difficulties.
-  Chapter 63, Tao Te Ching
   Translation by Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall
   Daodejing "Making This Life Significant": A Philosophical Translation, (2003), p. 175. 

"Perhaps the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time
and times to come, essentially the same - to bring people back from their present strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless, average, divine, original concrete."
-  Walt Whitman

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