Great Throughts Treasury

"Love of God, he said slowly, searching for words, is not always the same as love of good, I wish it were that simple. We know what is good, it is written in the Commandments. But God is not contained only in the Commandments, you know; they are only an infinitesimal part of Him. A man may abide by the Commandments and be far from God."

"Love said should not ask, nor can it demand. It has to have the strength to find itself certainty. At that time no longer it attracted, but attracts himself. Sinclair: love is attracted to me. The day itself attracts me, I will come. I do not want to make gifts. I want to be won."

"Love should not be crying or request, you must be the love of power makes him confident of himself and sustaining them. And then not only to become attracted even become attractive."

"Lucid and quiet his voice hovered above the listeners, like a light, like a starry sky."

"Love must not entreat,' she added, 'or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract."

"Making music together is the best way for two people to become friends."

"Man designs for himself a garden with a hundred kinds of trees, a thousand kinds of flowers, a hundred kinds of fruit and vegetables. Suppose, then, that the gardener of this garden knew no other distinction between edible and inedible, nine-tenths of this garden would be useless to him. He would pull up the most enchanting flowers and hew down the noblest trees and even regard them with a loathing and envious eye. This is what the Steppenwolf does with the thousand flowers of his soul. What does not stand classified as either man or wolf he does not see at all."

"Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads. The ancient Asiatics knew this well enough, and in the Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking the illusion of the personality. The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen."

"Man is not by any means of fixed and enduring form (this, in spite of suspicions to the contrary on the part of their wise men, was the ideal of the ancients). He is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit. His innermost destiny drives him on to the spirit and to God. His innermost longing draws him back to nature, the mother. Between the two forces his life hangs tremulous and irresolute."

"Man's life seems to me like a long, weary night that would be intolerable if there were not occasionally flashes of light, the sudden brightness of which is so comforting and wonderful, that the moments of their appearance cancel out and justify the years of darkness."

"Madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom."

"Many people say they love nature . That is, they are not averse to leave ever and its offered stimuli like themselves. They go out and look forward to the beauty of the earth, trample the meadows and eventually tear a lot of flowers and twigs to make them soon throw again or leave home wither. They love nature."

"Many people say 'they love nature,' by which they mean they don't dislike the charms nature displays before them. They go on outings, delight in the beauty of the earth as they trample meadows and tear off flowers and sprigs, only to discard them or let them wilt at home. That is how they love nature."

"Many verses of the holy books, above all the Upanishads of Sama-Veda spoke of this innermost thing. It is written: Your soul is the whole world. It says that when a man is asleep, he penetrates his innermost and dwells in Atman. There was wonderful wisdom in these verses; all the knowledge of the sages was told here in enchanting language, pure as honey collected by the bees."

"Many will never man remains frog, lizard remains, remains ant. Some is top man and bottom fish. But each is a union of nature after towards people. And all are the origins together, the mothers, we all come from the same throat; but each sought a trial and throw out of the depths, his own goal. We can understand each other; but can interpret each only himself."

"Merchant: 'So you have lived on the possessions of others?' Saddhartha: 'Apparently. The merchant also lives on the possession of others.' Merchant: 'Well spoken."

"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."

"More and slower went thoughtfully and wondered meanwhile: What is, therefore, what you had wanted to learn from the doctrines and teachers, and that they, despite having you revealed many things, have failed to teach you? ¯. And he found: It was the self, what I wanted to learn the meaning and essence. The ego was, what I wanted to free myself, what I wanted to overcome. But I could not overcome it, could only deceive him, I could only flee or hide in front of him. Indeed, nothing in the world has so occupied my thoughts like this my Self, this riddle I live, to be one, distinct and separate from all others, of being Siddhartha! And I know of nothing in the world any more than on me, Siddhartha."

"Men of dreams, the lovers and the poets, are better in most things than the men of my sort; the men of intellect. You take your being from your mothers. You live to the full: it is given you to love with your whole strength, to know and taste the whole of life. We thinkers, though often we seem to rule you, cannot live with half your joy and full reality. Ours is a thin and arid life, but the fullness of being is yours; yours the sap of the fruit, the garden of lovers, the joyous pleasaunces of beauty. Your home is the earth, ours the idea of it. Your danger is to be drowned in the world of sense, ours to gasp for breath in airless space. You are a poet, I a thinker. You sleep on your mother's breast, I watch in the wilderness. On me there shines the sun; on you the moon with all the stars. Your dreams are all of girls, mine of boys?"

"Maybe, said Siddhartha wearily. I am like you. You cannot love either, otherwise how could you practice love as an art? Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can - that is their secret."

"May come times of terrorism and extreme misery, if it is estimated to be of misery, there can only be so intellectually, moving backwards to save the culture of ancient times, and is moving forward to representing the serenity and satisfaction."

"Most men will not swim before they are able to.? Is not that witty? Naturally, they won?t swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they won?t think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what?s more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown."

"Most people are like a falling leaf as it twists and turns its way through the air, lurches and tumbles to the ground. Others, though ? a very few ? are like stars set on a fixed course; no wind can reach them, and they carry their law and their path within them."

"Most people do not want rather than swim until they can do it."

"Most intellectuals and most artists belong to the same type. Only the strongest of them force their way through the atmosphere of the bourgeois earth and attain to the cosmic. The others all resign themselves or make compromises. Despising the bourgeoisie, and yet belonging to it, they add to its strength and glory; for in the last resort they have to share their beliefs in order to live. The lives of these infinitely numerous persons make no claim to the tragic; but they live under an evil star in a quite considerable affliction; and in this hell their talents ripen and bear fruit. The few who break free seek their reward in the unconditioned and go down in splendor. They wear the thorn crown and their number is small. The others, however, who remain in the fold and from whose talents the bourgeoisie reaps much gain, have a third kingdom left open to them, an imaginary and yet a sovereign world, humor. The lone wolves who know no peace, these victims of unceasing pain to whom the urge for tragedy has been denied and who can never break through the starry space, who feel themselves summoned thither and yet cannot survive in its atmosphere?for them is reserved, provided suffering has made their spirits tough and elastic enough, a way of reconcilement and an escape into humor. Humor has always something bourgeois in it, although the true bourgeois is incapable of understanding it. In its imaginary realm the intricate and many-faceted ideal of all Steppenwolves finds its realization. Here it is possible not only to extol the saint and the profligate in one breath and to make the poles meet, but to include the bourgeois, too, in the same affirmation. Now it is possible to be possessed by God and to affirm the sinner, and vice versa, but it is not possible for either saint or sinner (or for any other of the unconditioned) to affirm as well that lukewarm mean, the bourgeois. Humor alone, that magnificent discovery of those who are cut short in their calling to highest endeavor, those who falling short of tragedy are yet as rich in gifts as in affliction, humor alone (perhaps the most inborn and brilliant achievement of the spirit) attains to the impossible and brings every aspect of human existence within the rays of its prism. To live in the world as though it were not the world, to respect the law and yet to stand above it, to have possessions as though one possessed nothing, to renounce as though it were no renunciation, all these favorite and often formulated propositions of an exalted worldly wisdom, it is in the power of humor alone to make efficacious."

"Most people, Kamala, are like leaves that are shaken, floating and tumbling in the air, swaying and swinging until they reach the ground. Others, however, few, are like stars in a fixed trajectory, untouched by wind, INSI they bear in their own law and their own path."

"Most people have no desire to swim until they are able to. Isn?t that a laugh? Of course they don?t want to swim! After all, they were born to live on dry land, not in water. Nor, of course, do they want to think. They weren?t made to think, but to live! It?s true, and anyone who makes thinking his priority may well go far as a thinker, but when all?s said and done he has just mistaken water for dry land, and one of these days he?ll drown."

"Mountains at Night: The lake has died down, the reed, black in its sleep, whispers in a dream. Expanding immensely into the countryside, the mountains loom, outspread. They are not resting. They breathe deeply, and hold themselves, pressed tightly, to one another. Deeply breathing, laden with mute forces, caught in a wasting passion."

"Music does not depend on being right, on having good taste and education and all that. Indeed. Then what does it depend on? On making music, Herr Haller, on making music as well and as much as possible and with all the intensity of which one is capable."

"Mozart is in our human charm that was completed at an early age charm suggest ourselves in love influential weird. Bach and represents , in our surrender filled with religiosity and amniotic tenderness of the need and necessity of death, to the will of God patriarchal."

"Mozart is waiting for me. Pablo is waiting for me."

"My goal is this: always to put myself in the place in which I am best able to serve, wherever my gifts and qualities find the best soil to grow, the widest field of action. There is no other goal."

"My life, I resolved, ought to be a perpetual transcending, a progression from stage to stage; I wanted it to pass through one area after the next, leaving each behind, as music moves on from theme to theme, from tempo to tempo, playing each out to the end, completing each and leaving it behind, never tiring, never sleeping, forever wakeful, forever in the present. In connection with the experiences of awakening, I had noticed that such stages and such areas exist, and that each successive period in one?s life bears within itself, as it is approaching its end, a note of fading and eagerness for death. That in turn leads to a shifting to a new area, to awakening and new beginnings."

"My advice to the person suffering from lack of time and from apathy is this: Seek out each day as many as possible of the small joys, and thriftily save up the larger, more demanding pleasures for holidays and appropriate hours. It is the small joys first of all that are granted us for recreation, for daily relief and disburdenment, not the great ones."

"My life had become weariness. It had wandered in a maze of unhappiness that led to renunciation and nothingness; it was bitter with the salt of all human things; yet it had laid up riches, riches to be proud of."

"My resolve to die was not the whim of an hour. It was the ripe, sound fruit that had slowly grown to full size, lightly rocked by the winds of fate whose next breath would bring it to the ground."

"My real self wanders elsewhere, far away, wanders on and on invisibly and has nothing to do with my life."

"My path had led me at that time into a new life, which had now grown old and is dead."

"My soul breathed once more. My eyes were opened. There were moments when I felt with a glow that I had only to snatch up my scattered images and raise my life as Harry Haller and as the Steppenwolf to the unity of one picture, in order to enter myself into the world of imagination and be immortal. Was not this, then, the goal set for the progress of every human life?"

"Narziss, I am guilty of having passed rash judgment on you. I had thought you proud, and perhaps I did you an injustice. You are much alone, brother; you have many to admire you, but no friends. I wished to find the pretext to chide you a little. But I find none. I wanted to see you as disobedient as young men of your age are easily are. But you never disobey. Sometimes Narziss, you make me uneasy."

"Narziss was dark and thin of face, and Goldmund open and radiant as a flower. Narziss was a thinker and anatomiser, Goldmund a dreamer and a child. Yet things common to both could bridge these differences. Both were knightly and delicate; both set apart by visible signs from their fellows, since both had received the particular admonishment of fate."

"Narcissus knew only too well what a charming golden bird had flown to him. This hermit soon sensed a kindred soul in Goldmund, in spite of their apparent contrasts. Narcissus was dark and spare; Goldmund, a radiant youth. Narcissus was analytical, a thinker; Goldmund, a dreamer with the soul of a child. But something they had in common bridged these contrasts: both were refined; both were different from the others because of obvious gifts and signs; both bore the special mark of fate."

"Naturally I belonged to the bright and correct world, I was my parents? child; but wherever I turned my eyes and ears, the other world was there and I lived in it, too, even though it was often unfamiliar and uncanny to me."

"My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams-like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves."

"Narcissus?s thoughts were far more occupied with Goldmund than Goldmund imagined. He wanted the bright boy as a friend. He sensed in him his opposite, his complement; he would have liked to adopt, lead, enlighten, strengthen, and bring him to bloom. But he held himself back, for many reasons, almost all of them conscious. Most of all, he felt tied and hemmed in by his distaste for teachers or monks who, all too frequently, fell in love with a pupil or a novice. Often enough, he had felt with repulsion the desiring eyes of older men upon him, had met their enticements and cajoleries with wordless rebuttal. He understood them better now that he knew the temptation to love the charming boy, to make him laugh, to run a caressing hand through his blond hair. But he would never do that, never."

"Natures of your kind, with strong, delicate senses, the soul-oriented, the dreamers, poets, lovers are always superior to us creatures of the mind. You take your being from your mothers. You live fully; you were endowed with the strength of love, the ability to feel. Whereas we creatures of reason, we don't live fully; we live in an arid land, even though we often seem to guide and rule you. Yours is the plentitude of life, the sap of the fruit, the garden of passion, the beautiful landscape of art. Your home is the earth; ours is the world of ideas. You are in danger of drowning in the world of the senses; ours is the danger of suffocating in an airless void. You are an artist; I am a thinker. You sleep at your mother's breast; I wake in the desert. For me the sun shines; for you the moon and the stars."

"Never again! commanded his will. Again! Tomorrow! begged his heart."

"Never a man has been completely himself, although most have the firm conviction be one day, one between mist and others with perfect brightness, but each one as best you can. All carry on their backs until the end of the viscous and leftovers of a primary world."

"Never before this time I felt that I had done so much damage simply because of having to live."

"Never give the impression as if you do, make time for anyone who wants to talk to you."