It was wonderful to be living in a house in a reign of peace, order, tranquility, duty and good conscience, forgiveness and love – but it was no less wonderful to know there was the other, the loud and shrill, sullen and violent world from which you could dart back to your mother in one leap.
All the girls I had ever loved were mine. Each gave me what she alone had to give and to each I gave what she alone knew how to take.
When someone is searching then it might easily happen that the only thing his eyes still see is that what he searches for, that he is unable to find anything, to let anything enter his mind, because he always thinks of nothing but the object of his search. Searching means: having a goal. Finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.
Anyone who has hope is happy.
We who bore the mark, felt no anxiety about the shape the future was to take. All of these faiths and teachings seemed to us already dead and useless. The only duty and destiny we acknowledged was that each one of us should become so completely himself, so utterly faithful to the active seed which nature planted within him, that in living out its growth he could be surprised by nothing unknown to come.
A person can neither think what he wants to nor can I make him think what I want to.
I call a man awake who knows in his conscious reason his innermost unreasonable forces, drives, and weaknesses and knows how to deal with them.
Deeply, he felt the love for the run-away in his heart, like a wound, and he felt at the same time that this wound had not been given to him in order to turn the knife in it, that it had to become a blossom and had to shine.
Als we iemand haten dan haten we in zijn beeld iets dat in onszelf huist. Wat niet in onszelf huist, windt ons niet op.
Whenever he is hungry and opens his bag, there are only pearls inside.
Each one carries with him to the end traces of his birth, the slime and eggshells of a primordial world.
She taught him, that lovers must not part from one another after celebrating love, without one admiring the other, without being just as defeated as they have been victorious, so that with none of them should start feeling fed up or bored and get that evil feeling of having abused or having been abused.
In reality there was only one thing you dreaded: letting yourself fall, taking the step into uncertainty, the little step beyond all the securities that existed. And whoever had once surrendered himself, one single time, whoever had practiced the great act of confidence and entrusted himself to fate, was liberated. He no longer obeyed the laws of earth; he had fallen into space and swung along in the dance of the constellations. That was it.
Teaching and surrounded by disciples, he was wandering through the land, with no property, with no home, with no wife, in the yellow cloak of an ascetic, but with a serene brow: a blissful man.
I pondered my friend’s words. I liked best what he had said about the fireballs since I myself often had the same feeling. The quiet spell of the colored flame, rising into the darkness and all too soon drowning in it, struck me as a symbol of all human pleasure, for the more beautiful it is, the less it satisfies us and the more quickly it is spent.
When someone is seeking,’ said Siddhartha, ’it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.
But things are not so simple in life as in our thoughts, nor so rough and ready as in our poor idiotic language; and Harry lies about himself twice over when he employs this niggardly wolf-theory.
But it seems that Abraxas has a much greater significance. We may look upon the name as that of a deity who had the symbolic task of combining the godlike and the devilish.” The.
I have become weary and distrustful of teaching and learning, and that I have little faith in words that come to us from teachers.
But though the ways led away from the self, their end nevertheless always led back to the self.