Great Throughts Treasury

"Idleness is the beginning of all vices, the crown of all virtues."

"There are two main human sins from which all others derive: impatience and indolence. Because of impatience they were expelled from Paradise, because of indolence they don't return."

"You need not do anything. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, just wait. And you need not even wait. Just become quiet and still and solitary and the world will offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet."

"The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty."

"There are questions that we wouldn't be able to get over if we weren't by our very nature set free from them."

"Man cannot live without a lasting trust in something indestructible within him, both his trust and its indestructible object can remain forever concealed from him. One expression of this concealment is man's faith in a personal God."

"Parents who expect gratitude from their children (there are even some who insist on it) are like usurers who gladly risk their capital if only they receive interest."

"The fact that our task is exactly as large as our life makes it appear infinite."

"There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction. One has to go abroad in order to find the home one has lost."

"There are countless places of refuge, there is only one place of salvation; but the possibilities of salvation, again, are as numerous as all the places of refuge."

"Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, though both the indestructible element and the trust may remain permanently hidden from him."

"Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old."

"Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man."

"Every man lives behind bars, which he carries within him."

"Only our concept of Time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name; in reality it is a summary count in perpetual session."

"A young man who doesn’t believe in tomorrow morning is a traitor to himself."

"The meaning of life is that it stops."

"Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency. "

"By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. "

"Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old. "

"A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us."

"Association with human beings lures one into self-observation. "

"How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge? "

"Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made."

"It is only our conception of time that makes us call the Last Judgement by this name. It is, in fact, a kind of martial law."

"Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy"

"From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached."

"My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted."

"Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it. "

"The fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infinite."

"There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie. "

"The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler."

"Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable. "

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?"

"Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man, and this immediately, though, of course, only in the case of complete and permanent humility. It can do this because it is the true language of prayer, at once adoration and the firmest of unions. The relationship to one’s fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one’s striving."

"All human errors are impatience, the premature breaking off of what is methodical, an apparent fencing in of the apparent thing."

"Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come."

"We are sinful not merely because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we find ourselves is sinful, quite independent of guilt."

"All these thoughts, seemingly independent of you, were from the beginning burdened with your belittling judgments; it was almost impossible to endure this and still work out a thought with any measure of completeness and permanence."

"Dearest Father, You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. And if I now try to give you an answer in writing, it will still be very incomplete, because, even in writing, this fear and its consequences hamper me in relation to you and because the magnitude of the subject goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning."

"I cannot recall your ever having abused me directly and in downright abusive terms. Nor was that necessary; you had so many other methods, and besides, in talk at home and particularly at business the words of abuse went flying around me in such swarms, as they were flung at other people?s heads, that as a little boy I was sometimes almost stunned and had no reason not to apply them to myself too, for the people you were abusing were certainly no worse than I was and you were certainly not more displeased with them than with me. And here again was your enigmatic innocence and inviolability; you cursed and swore without the slightest scruple; yet you condemned cursing and swearing in other people and would not have it."

"The impossibility of getting on calmly together had one more result, actually a very natural one: I lost the capacity to talk. I dare say I would not have become a very eloquent person in any case, but I would, after all, have acquired the usual fluency of human language. But at a very early stage you forbade me to speak. Your threat, ?Not a word of contradiction!? and the raised hand that accompanied it have been with me ever since. What I got from you ? and you are, whenever it is a matter of your own affairs, an excellent talker ? was a hesitant, stammering mode of speech, and even that was still too much for you, and finally I kept silent, at first perhaps out of defiance, and then because I could neither think nor speak in your presence. And because you were the person who really brought me up, this has had its repercussions throughout my life."

"Since there was nothing at all I was certain of, since I needed to be provided at every instant with a new confirmation of my existence, since nothing was in my very own, undoubted, sole possession, determined unequivocally only by me ? in sober truth a disinherited son ? naturally I became unsure even of the thing nearest to me, my own body."

"The main thing was that the bread should be cut straight. But it didn?t matter that you did it with a knife dripping with gravy. Care had to be taken that no scraps fell on the floor. In the end it was under your chair that there were most scraps."

"This, your usual way of representing it, I regard as accurate only in so far as I too believe you are entirely blameless in the matter of our estrangement. But I am equally entirely blameless. If I could get you to acknowledge this, then what would be possible is ? not, I think, a new life, we are both much too old for that ? but still, a kind of peace; no cessation, but still, a diminution of your unceasing reproaches."

"I was a timid child. For all that, I am sure I was also obstinate, as children are. I am sure that Mother spoilt me too, but I cannot believe I was particularly difficult to manage; I cannot believe that a kindly word, a quiet taking by the hand, a friendly look, could not have got me to do anything that was wanted of me. Now you are, after all, at bottom a kindly and softhearted person (what follows will not be in contradiction to this, I am speaking only of the impression you made on the child), but not every child has the endurance and fearlessness to go on searching until it comes to the kindliness that lies beneath the surface. You can only treat a child in the way you yourself are constituted, with vigor, noise, and hot temper, and in this case this seemed to you, into the bargain, extremely suitable, because you wanted to bring me up to be a strong brave boy."

"One had, so it seemed to the child, remained alive through your mercy and bore one?s life henceforth as an undeserved gift from you? It is also true that you hardly ever really gave me a whipping. But the shouting, the way your face got red, the hasty undoing of the braces and laying them ready over the back of the chair, all that was almost worse for me. It is as if someone is going to be hanged. If he really is hanged, then he is dead and it is all over. But if he has to go through all the preliminaries to being hanged and he learns of his reprieve only when the noose is dangling before his face, he may suffer from it all his life. Besides, from the many occasions on which I had, according to your clearly expressed opinion, deserved a whipping but was let off at the last moment by your grace, I again accumulated only a huge sense of guilt. On every side I was to blame, I was in your debt."

"To you the matter always seemed very simple, at least in so far as you talked about it in front of me, and indiscriminately in front of many other people. It looked to you more or less as follows: you have worked hard all your life, have sacrificed everything for your children, above all for me, consequently I have lived high and handsome, have been completely at liberty to learn whatever I wanted, and have had no cause for material worries, which means worries of any kind at all. You have not expected any gratitude for this, knowing what ?children?s gratitude? is like, but have expected at least some sort of obligingness, some sign of sympathy. Instead I have always hidden from you, in my room, among my books, with crazy friends, or with extravagant ideas... If you sum up your judgment of me, the result you get is that, although you don?t charge me with anything downright improper or wicked (with the exception perhaps of my latest marriage plan), you do charge me with coldness, estrangement, and ingratitude. And, what is more, you charge me with it in such a way as to make it seem my fault, as though I might have been able, with something like a touch on the steering wheel, to make everything quite different, while you aren?t in the slightest to blame, unless it be for having been too good to me."

"What I would have needed was a little encouragement, a little friendliness, a little keeping open of my road, instead of which you blocked it for me, though of course with the good intention of making me go another road. But I was not fit for that... At that time, and at that time in every way, I would have needed encouragement."

"We were so different and in our difference so dangerous to each other that if anyone had tried to calculate in advance how I, the slowly developing child, and you, the full-grown man, would stand to each other, he could have assumed that you would simply trample me underfoot so that nothing was left of me. Well, that did not happen. Nothing alive can be calculated. But perhaps something worse happened. And in saying this I would all the time beg of you not to forget that I never, and not even for a single moment, believe any guilt to be on your side. The effect you had on me was the effect you could not help having. But you should stop considering it some particular malice on my part that I succumbed to that effect."