No, there was no teaching a truly searching person, someone who truly wanted to find, could accept. But he who had found, he could approve of any teachings, every path, every goal, there was nothing standing between him and all the other thousand any more who lived in that what is eternal, who breathed what is divine.
If a transaction in progress appeared threatened with failure, if a shipment of goods seemed to have gone astray, or if a debtor appeared unable to repay his debt, Kamaswami was never able to persuade Siddhartha that it was useful to speak words of worry or of anger, to have a wrinkled brow, or to sleep poorly.
But living alone forever and ever, among the quietly sleeping tree trunks, with animals that ran away, with whom one could not speak – that would be unbearably sad.
The person who truly wants nothing except his destiny no longer has others of his own kind; he stands completely alone and has only the chill of outer space around him. You know, that’s Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane.
I realised that all this talk was of no value and at its best only led to clever phrases.
Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity.
I see that you think more than you can express. But, if that’s the case, you must also know that you have never fully lived out your thoughts, and that isn’t good. Only the thoughts that we live out have any value. You knew that your ‘permissible world’ was only half the world, and you tried to hide away the second half from yourself, the way clergymen and teachers do. You won’t succeed! No one can do that when he has once begun to think.
First you must climb the Mountain of Knowledge, then you must perform some deeds, and finally you must find love and become happy.
Good stories are like those noble wild animals that make their home in hidden spots, and you must often settle down at the entrance of the caves and woods and lie in wait for them a long time.
Every day I did something wrong, and in the end I began to enjoy it.
Now and then I have expressed the opinion that every nation, and every person, would do better, instead of rocking himself to sleep with political catchwords about war-guilt, to ask himself how far his own faults and negligencies and evil tendencies are guilty of the war and all the other wrongs of the world, and that there lies the only possible means of avoiding the next war.
An occasionally, I became very sad over that happiness, because I was well aware it couldn’t last.
Had he ever lost his heart so much to something, had he ever loved any person thus, thus blindly, thus sufferingly, thus unsuccessfully, and yet thus happily?
The Steppenwolf, however, first threw up his sharp, closely cropped head and sniffed around nervously before he either made any answer or announced his name. “Oh, it smells good here,” he said, and at that he smiled and my aunt smiled too.
The water changed to vapour and rose, became rain and came down again, became spring, brook and river, changed a new, flowed anew.
People with courage and character are always called peculiar by other people.
What would many happy citizens and trustworthy officials have become but unruly, stormy innovators and dreamers of useless dreams, if not for the effort of their schools?
Psychoanalysis has at bottom no other goal than to create a space within oneself in which God’s voice can be heard.
Let the little way to death be as it might, the kernel of this life of mine was noble. It had purpose and character and turned not on trifles, but on the stars.
Both thought and the senses were fine things, behind both of them lay hidden the last meaning; it was worth while listening to them both, to play with both, neither to despise nor overrate either of them, but to listen intently to both voices.