I dropped all my defenses and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart.
Mathematics, as far as he was concerned, was a Sphinx charged with deceitful puzzles whose cold malicious gaze transfixed her victims, and he gave the monster a wide berth.
I had to become a fool, to find Atman in me again. I had to sin, to be able to live again. Where else might my path lead me to? It is foolish, this path, it moves in loops, perhaps it is going around in a circle. Let it go as it likes, I want to to take it.
That’s like this: any truth can only be expressed and put into words when it is one-sided. Everything is one-sided which can be thought with thoughts and said with words, it’s all one-sided, all just one half, all lacks completeness, roundness, oneness.
And when Siddhartha was listening attentively to this river, this song of a thousand voices, when he neither listened to the suffering nor the laughter, when he did not tie his soul to any particular voice and submerged his self into it, but when he heard them all, perceived the whole, the oneness, then the great song of the thousand voices consisted of a single word, which was Om: the perfection.
Man is a dubious mixture of mind and matter; since the mind unlocks recognition of the eternal to him, while matter pulls him down and binds him to the transitory, he should strive away from the senses and toward the mind if he wishes to elevate his life and give it meaning.
Perhaps he was handsome, perhaps I liked him, perhaps I also found him repulsive, I could not be sure of that either.
Intensity of life is only possible at the expense of self. But there is nothing members of the bourgeoisie value more highly than self, albeit only at a rudimentary stage of development. Thus, at the expense of intensity, they manage to preserve their selves and make them secure. Instead of possession by God, an easy conscience is the reward they reap; instead of desire, contentment; instead of liberty, cosiness; instead of life-threatening heat, an agreeable temperature.
I don’t know who lives there, but there must be a paradise of cleanliness and dust-free bourgeois existence behind that glass door, an Eden of order and painstaking devotion to little routines and chores that is touching.’ Since.
Every life has its radiance and beauty.
It’s true that everybody reaches inevitabely what a real drive makes him look for. But in the middle of this obtained freedom Harry suddenly realized that he was alone, that the world left him alone in a very sinister way, that people did non interest him, that he himself did non interest himself that he continued to live more and more in an air without any relations where he slowly suffocated in loneliness.
Be aware of too much wisdom!
Smiling, Siddhartha felt happiness at the friendship and friendliness of the ferryman. He is like Govinda, he thought, smiling. All the people I meet upon my way are like Govinda. All of them are grateful, though they themselves have cause to expect gratitude. All of them are deferential, all are eager to be a friend, to obey and think little. People are children.
What is meditation? What is leaving one’s body? What is fasting? What is holding one’s breath? It is fleeing from the Self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a Self; it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life.
Rothfuss thought about his eccentric friend who wanted nothing of life but to look on, and... could not have said if this was asking too much or too little.
How unusually beautiful the forest was in the morning without anyone walking through it but him, column after column of spruce, a vast hall with a blue-green vault.
Animals are sad as a rule,” she went on. “And when a man is sad – I don’t mean because he has a toothache or has lost some money, but because he sees, for once in a way, how it all is with life and everything, and is sad in earnest – he always looks a little like an animal. He looks not only sad, but more right and more beautiful than usual. That’s how it is, and that’s how you looked, Steppenwolf, when I saw you for the first time.
Oh, I know it today: nothing in the world is more repugnant to a man than following the path that leads him to himself!
Everything was a lie, everything stank, everything stank of lies, everything feigned meaning and happiness and beauty, and yet everything was decaying while nobody acknowledged the fact. The world tested bitter; life was agony.
But what a path it has been! I have had to pass through so much foolishness, so much vice, so much error, so much nausea and disillusionment and wretchedness, merely in order to become a child again and be able to start over. But all of this was just and proper.