Isn’t the fulfillment of our duty towards our neighbor an expression of deepest desire?
The truth is so simple that it is regarded as a pretentious banality.
The devils enter uninvited when the house stands empty. For other kinds of guests, you have to first open the door.
He who wants to keep his garden tidy doesn’t reserve a plot for weeds.
Destiny is something not to be desired and not to be avoided.
The ‘great’ commitment is so much easier than the ordinary everyday one.
Creative people have to be fed from the divine source.
The big, shoe-thumping fellow continues as a dark thunderhead to threaten all unrepentant non-Communists with hail and thunder.
This accidental meeting of possibilities calls itself I. I ask: what am I doing here? And, at once, this I becomes unreal.
It is not the repeated mistakes, the long succession of petty betrayals – though, God knows, they would give cause enough for anxiety and self-contempt – but the huge elementary mistake, the betrayal of that within me which is greater than I – in complacent adjustment to alien demands.
Forgiving is forgetting, in spite of remembering.
Time goes by: reputation increases, ability declines.
The dizziness in the face of les espaces infinis – only overcome if we dare to gaze into them without any protection. And accept them as the reality before which we must justify our existence. For this is the truth we must reach to live, that everything is and we just in it.
When the sense of the earth unites with the sense of one’s body, one becomes earth of the earth, a plant among plants, an animal born from the soil and fertilizing it. In this union, the body is confirmed in its pantheism.
To preserve the silence within – amid all the noise. To remain open and quiet, a moist humus in the fertile darkness where the rain falls and the grain ripens – no matter how many tramp across the parade ground in whirling dust under an arid sky.
You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy does not reserve a plot for weeds.
Doffing the ego’s safe glory, he finds his naked reality.
Acts of violence – Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death – and the meaninglessness of killing.
It is not we who seek the Way, but the Way which seeks us. That is why you are faithful to it, even while you stand waiting, so long as you are prepared, and act the moment you are confronted by its demands.
If a good person does you wrong, act as though you had not noticed it. They will make note of this and not remain in your debt long.