Great Throughts Treasury

"It [enlightenment] has not come to you by means of teaching! And-thus is my thought, oh exalted one,-nobody will obtain salvation by means of teachings! (character of Siddhartha, speaking to the Buddha)"

"It burns in me a wild lust for strong feelings, for sensations, dislike this hackneyed, standardized and sterilized life, and a fierce desire somewhere to save a little piece, a department store or a cathedral or myself, to commit reckless stupidity, a few revered idols to tear off the wigs, a few rebellious schoolboys providing the longed tickets to Hamburg, to seduce a little girl or a few representatives of the bourgeois world order the neck to rotate. For this hated, loathed, and I cursed everything to be the most violent: the satisfaction, the health, this cherished optimism of the citizens, this fat fertile complacency of the mediocre, the ordinary."

"It did not run the man and wolf parallel, much less mutual aid were provided, but were in constant and deadly hatred, and everyone lived exclusively for martyrdom other, and when two are mortal enemies and are in a same blood and the same soul, then it is an impossible life. But anyway, everyone has their luck, and easy is not any."

"It enraged and exhausted me to observe how the common daily life callously demanded its due and devoured the abundance of optimism I had brought with me."

"It is always difficult birth. The bird has to toil to hatch."

"It is easier to bear the worries of wandering than to find peace in your hometown, where only the sage can live in a happy house surrounded by trite troubles and daily distractions."

"It has clearly recognized and felt the bad loans, despair of human life; the delight of the moment and feeling pitiful; inability to pay a beautiful height of feelings if not the prison of everyday life; the earnest expectation of the empire of the spirit, which is eternal death struggle with love, also burning and also sacred to the lost innocence of nature; the terrible float in the void, be doomed to eternal and dilettantism attempt ... In short, all sterility, involvement and searing despair of the human being."

"It is extremely beautiful to belong to a woman, to give yourself. Don?t laugh if I sound foolish. But to love a woman, you see, to abandon yourself to her, to absorb her completely and feel absorbed by her, that is not what you call ?being in love,? which you mock a little. For me it is the road to life, the way toward the meaning of life."

"It has been a continual consolation to me and a justification for all life that there is music in the world."

"It is many thousands of people have gained the most expensive happiness, but why should not I? Even the wicked, even thieves and robbers are loved, just not me."

"It is good, he thought to taste for yourself everything you need to know. That worldly pleasures and wealth are not good things, I learned even as a child. I knew it for a long time, but only now have I experienced it. And now I know it, I know it not only because I remember hearing it, but with my eyes, with my heart, with my stomach. And it is good for me to know it!"

"It is good, he thought, to taste for oneself all that it is necessary to know. Already as a child I learned that worldly desires and wealth were not good things. I have known this for a long time but have only now experienced it. And now I do know it, know it not only with my memory but with my eyes, with my heart, and with my stomach. How glad I am to know it!"

"It is much more flattering... to fight for something beautiful and ideal and to know at the same time that you will not be able to reach it. Are ideals something that can be achieved? Will we live to die with death? No, we will live to fear it and also to love it, and it is precisely because of death that our life for another time shines so bright in a beautiful moment."

"It is my ambition as a poet to maintain, for a small number of people who may happen to understand me and be accessible to my influence, a transcendent life, or at least the desire for it, in the midst of the money-and-war-culture which the world has become."

"It is mere fiction that that there is no connecting bridge between the two people, and they all live in solitude and incomprehension. On the contrary, what people have in common with others is something bigger and more important than that every human being is by nature and what distinguishes it from others."

"It is not able to obtain a share of the fun only after getting permission from the rest of the people is a poor man."

"It is not for me to give judgment on the lives of others! Only for myself I have to be the judge, to choose, to refuse."

"It is not a good thing when man overstrains his reason and tries to reduce to rational order matters that are not susceptible of rational treatment. Then there arise ideals such as those of the Americans or of the Bolsheviks. Both are extraordinarily rational, and both lead to a frightful oppression and impoverishment of life, because they simplify it so crudely. The likeness of man, once a high ideal, is in process of becoming a machine-made article. It is for madmen like us, perhaps, to ennoble it again."

"It is not my place to judge another person?s life. Only for myself, for myself alone, I must decide, I must choose, I must refuse."

"It is not good when humanity brain and the intellect is trying to regulate things that are not at all accessible to reason. Then born ideals such as the ideals of Americans or of the Bolsheviks, who were both unusually reasonable, but who nevertheless commit violence and looting of life, because it so naive to simplify. Image of man, once a high ideal, begins to turn into a clich‚. Maybe we is me nuts elevate."

"It is not our task to get closer, so do not approach each other as the sun and the moon, or the sea and the land. The two of us, dear friend, we are the sun and the moon, are the sea and the land. Our m‚ta is not to transform into one another, but to get to know one another and learn any to see and another to respect what he is: our opposite and our complement."

"It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone."

"It is pure fiction that there is no bridge between one person and another, ? On the contrary, what people have in common with each other is much more and of greater importance than what each person has in his own nature and which makes him different from others.'That is possible,' I said, 'but what good does it do me to know all this?"

"It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard."

"It is not the world less, not well developed slowly in the long road to perfection; no, it fully in every moment and every sin involves inside forgiveness, and young children are all senior elders possible. The infants are all carrying death lurking in them - and all of the dead are promised eternal life. It is not possible for one person to see to what extent was the last person runs from the road, the Buddha is in just as the thief is in the punter, and the thief is in Albarhami. It is possible during deep meditation deny the time, and the novel past, present and future all at once, and then everything becomes good, full, Brahma and then it seems to me that all that exists is better - life and death alike. Sin and holiness, wisdom and madness. Everything necessary, everything needs only to my consent, and I receive my understanding and loving, and then everything becomes so well with me, and nothing can harm , that drives me. I have learned through my body and my soul it is inevitable to me from falling into the pain, and I needed to lust, and that I should seek to own, and suffer nausea and the depths of despair until I learn not, and even learn to love the world and the palms of all comparable to another type of fantasy world of junk, a kind of fictional vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, and I love it and be happy with belonging to him."

"It is still painful, that cannot be denied."

"It is useless for you to build walls and dormitories and chapels and churches. Death looks through the window and laughs."

"It is treason to sacrifice love of truth, intellectual honesty, loyalty to the laws and methods of the mind, to any other interests, including those of one's country."

"It is understandable that there has been a good deal of joking about purely learned works of this type. Their actual value for the future of scholarship and for the people as a whole cannot be demonstrated. Nevertheless, scholarship, as was true for art in the olden days, must indeed have far-flung grazing grounds, and in pursuit of a subject which interests no one but himself a scholar can accumulate knowledge which provides colleagues with information as valuable as that stored in a dictionary or an archive."

"It is well known that no one writes as badly as the defenders of aging ideologies, that no one exercises his trade with less neatness and care."

"It is wrong to say that schoolmasters lack heart and are dried-up, soulless pedants! No, by no means. When a child's talent which he has sought to kindle suddenly bursts forth, when the boy puts aside his wooden sword, slingshot, bow-and-arrow and other childish games, when he begins to forge ahead, when the seriousness of the work begins to transform the rough-neck into a delicate, serious and an almost ascetic creature, when his face takes on an intelligent, deeper and more purposeful expression - then a teacher's heart laughs with happiness and pride. It is his duty and responsibility to control the raw energies and desires of his charges and replace them with calmer, more moderate ideals. What would many happy citizens and trustworthy officials have become but unruly, stormy innovators and dreamers of useless dreams, if not for the effort of their schools? In young beings there is something wild, ungovernable, uncultured which first has to be tamed. It is like a dangerous flame that has to be controlled or it will destroy. Natural man is unpredictable, opaque, dangerous, like a torrent cascading out of uncharted mountains. At the start, his soul is a jungle without paths or order. And, like a jungle, it must first be cleared and its growth thwarted. Thus it is the school's task to subdue and control man with force and make him a useful member of society, to kindle those qualities in him whose development will bring him to triumphant completion."

"It is what people have in common is much greater and it is more important than what each has only himself and what sets him apart."

"It isn't down in any map; true places never are."

"It is you I have been able to love, you alone in all the world. You can have no idea of what that means. It means a spring in the desert, a blossoming tree in the wilderness."

"It makes no difference, except for one small detail, which for me however is of utmost importance. I feel life flickering in me, be it on the tongue or in the soles, both in pleasure or is in torment, that my soul is mobile, and can creep in with a hundred games of fantasy in a hundred forms, for parish priests and travelers, for cooks and murderers, in children and animals, especially birds, and even trees, this is essential, I want this and this I need to live, and if one day all this would not be, if my life were to be framed in so-called reality then I'd rather die."

"It seems to me... that love is the most important thing in the world. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain it and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration, and respect."

"It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect."

"It seems to me that love is the most important thing. See through the world, interpret it and ignore it is a matter of great thinkers. But I was only anxious to love the world, not to despise, not to hate is not the world is not yourself to fight, to ourselves and to all beings cannot look with love and with admiration and awe."

"It seems to have been my bad luck always to receive more than I could return, from life and friends."

"It must be granted that many aspects of the intellectual life of that was shown energy and grandeur. We moderns explain its concomitant uncertainty and falseness as a symptom of the horror which seized men when at the end of an era of apparent victory and success they found themselves suddenly confronting a void: great scarcity material, a period of political and military crises, and An accelerating distrust of the intellect itself, of its own virtue and dignity and even of its own existence."

"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 a mystery? whether the solemn, silent man possessed more than human wisdom and stillness of spirit, or whether his mental powers had deserted him."

"It took me many years to lose my spirit, to unlearn thinking and forget the unity. Isn't it just as if I had turned about slowly and was on a long detour from being a man to being a child, from a thinker to a childlike person? And yet, this path has been very good, and the bird in my chest has not died. But what a path this has been! I had to pass through so much stupidity, so many vices, so many errors, so much disgust, so many disappointments and woes just to begin again. But it was fitting this way; my heart says Yes to it and my eyes smile at it. I've had to experience despair. I've had to descend to the most foolish of all thoughts--the thought of suicide--in order to be able to experience divine grace, to hear Om again, to be able to sleep and awaken properly again [...] Where else might my path lead me? This path is foolish; it moves in loops, and perhaps it is going around in a circle. Let it go where it likes; I want to follow it."

"It was a strange business and it made a sad and curious impression on me; everything that had belonged to me in these earlier years of my life left me, was alien and lost to me. I suddenly saw how sad and artificial my life had been during this period, for the loves, friends, habits and pleasures of these years were discarded like badly fitting clothes. I parted from them without pain and all that remained was to wonder that I could have endured them so long."

"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."

"It was accepted by the sweetness and tenderness so saddened by the excess of happiness."

"It was at a concert of lovely old music. After two or three notes of the piano the door was opened of a sudden to the other world. I sped through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. 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. It did not last very long, a quarter of an hour perhaps; but it returned to me in a dream at night, and since, through all the barren days, I caught a glimpse of it now and then. Sometimes for a minute or two I saw it clearly, threading my life like a divine and golden track. But nearly always it was blurred in dirt and dust. Then again it gleamed out in golden sparks as though never to be lost again and yet was soon quite lost once more."

"It was all this does not necessarily mean that his suspicions had fallen silent, he is aware of himself and at the same that faith and doubt are linked to one another, and that one condition for another, and exhale."

"It was all the same to him where he would end up; what mattered most was the fact he had finally escaped ? and shown ? that his will was stronger than mere commands and edicts."

"It was clear to me that my hosts too were feeling anything but comfortable, that their cheerfulness was forced, whether because they were inhibited by me, or else were out of sorts for some domestic reason. They only asked me questions it was impossible to give an honest answer to and, as a result, I had soon lied myself into such a corner that every word I uttered almost made me sick. Eventually in an effort to distract them, I started to tell them about the funeral I had witnessed that day, but I struck a wrong note. My attempts at humor did nothing to improve the general mood, and we were increasingly at odds with one another. Inside me, Steppenwolf was laughing and baring his teeth and, by the time dessert was served, we had all three fallen quite silent."