Sentimentality is a basking in feelings that in reality you don’t take seriously enough to make the slightest sacrifice to or ever translate into action.
I can think. I can wait. I can fast.
If I know what love is, it is because of you.
Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them.
One cannot apologize for something fundamental, and a child feels and knows this as well and as deeply as any sage.
In any case, the most lively young people become the best old people, not those who pretend to be as wise as grandfathers while they are still at school.
So you find yourself surrounded by death and horror in the world, and you escape it into lust. But lust has no duration; it leaves you again in the desert.
Did all this make sense?
Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One’s born and at once one is guilty.
The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.
Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. You, O worthy one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose.
It was the first rent in the holy image of my father, it was the first fissure in the columns that had upheld my childhood, which every individual must destroy before he can become himself.
Alas, Siddhartha, I see you suffering, but you’re suffering a pain at which one would like to laugh, at which you’ll soon laugh for yourself.
It taught him how to listen – how to listen with a quiet heart and a waiting soul, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinion.
It was all a lie, it all stank, stank of lies, it all gave the illusion of meaning and happiness and beauty, and all of it was just putrefaction that no one would admit to. Bitter was the taste of the world. Life was a torment.
I believe that the struggle against death, the unconditional and self-willed determination to live, is the mode of power behind the lives and activities of all outstanding men.
Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate this very hour, and he stopped suffering.
For the first time in my life I tasted death, and death tasted bitter, for death is birth, is fear and dread of some terrible renewal.
The true profession of a man is to find his way to himself.
The river is everywhere.