Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.
The cup was emptied and would never be filled again.
How could I fail to be a lone wolf, and an uncouth hermit, as I did not share one of its aims nor understand one of its pleasures?
Like one who has eaten and drunk too much and vomits painfully and then feels better, so did the restless man wish he could rid himself with one terrific heave of these pleasures, of these habits of this entirely senseless life.
Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence.
How foolish it is to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence.
That seems to be the way of things. Everyone takes, everyone gives. Life is like that.
Every phenomenon on earth is symbolic, and each symbol is an open gate through which the soul, if it is ready, can enter into the inner part of the world, where you and I and day and night are all one.
Theory is knowledge that doesn’t work. Practice is when everything works and you don’t know why.
The art of love-giving and taking become one.
But peace, too, is a living thing and like all life it must wax and wane, accommodate, withstand trials, and undergo changes.
A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to committ outrages...
Lovers should not separate from each other after making love without admiring each other, without being conquered as well as conquering, so that no feeling of satiation or desolation arises nor the horrid feeling of misusing or having been misused.
When all the Self was conquered and dead, when all passions and desires were silent, then the last must awaken, the innermost of Being that is no longer Self – the great secret!
To such men the desperate and horrible thought has come that perhaps the whole of human life is but a bad joke, a violent and ill-fated abortion of the primal mother, a savage and dismal catastophe of nature.
I have always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions.
You show the world as a complete, unbroken chain, an eternal chain, linked together by cause and effect.
You learned people and artists have, no doubt, all sorts of superior things in your heads; but you’re human beings like the rest of us, and we, too, have our dreams and fancies.
There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.
Siddhartha has one single goal-to become empty, to become empty of thirst, desire, dreams, pleasure and sorrow-to let the Self die. No longer to be Self, to experience the peace of an emptied heart, to experience pure thought-that was his goal.