Great Throughts Treasury

"Painting is marvelous; it makes you happier and more patient. Afterwards you do not have black fingers as with writing, but blue and red ones."

"Pain and colors of frustration and depression for no saddened and of the value and dignity, but was found to make us mature and serenity."

"Parting was there, it was autumn, fate, after the summer rose had smelt so ripe and fully was."

"People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer's slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue."

"Patria is not here or there. Patria is within you, or nowhere."

"People like best what is hard for them to obtain."

"Perfect music has its cause. It arises from equilibrium. Equilibrium arises from righteousness, and righteousness arises from the meaning of the cosmos. Therefore one can speak about music only with a man who has perceived the meaning of the cosmos."

"Possibly the apparent relapse they had suffered was not a fall and a cause for suffering, but a leap forward and a positive act."

"Psychoanalysis has at bottom no other goal than to create a space within oneself in which God?s voice can be heard."

"Perhaps he was handsome, perhaps I liked him, perhaps I also found him repulsive, I could not be sure of that either."

"People like you and me are quite lonely really but we still have each other, we have the secret satisfaction of being different, of rebelling, of desiring the unusual."

"Perhaps I was mad, as I thought at moments; perhaps I was not like other men? But I was able to do the same things the others did; with a little effort and industry I could read Plato, was able to solve problems in trigonometry or follow a chemical analysis. These was only one thing I could not do: wrest the dark secret goal from myself and keep it before me as others did who knew exactly what they wanted to be- professors, lawyers, doctors, artists, however long this would take them and whatever difficulties and advantages this decision would bear in its wake. This I could not do. Perhaps I would become something similar but how was I to know? Perhaps I would have to continue my search for years on end and would not become anything, and would not reach a goal. Perhaps I would reach this goal but it would turn out to be an evil, dangerous, horrible one?"

"Perhaps that you're searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don't find the time for finding? How come?"

"Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can - that is their secret."

"Perhaps this, that you are seeking all too much? That all your seeking is making you unable to find? How is this? Govinda asked. When a person seeks, Siddhartha said, it can easily happen that his eye sees only the thing he is seeking; he is incapable of finding anything, of allowing anything to enter into him, because he is always thinking only of what he is looking for, because he has a goal, because he is possessed by his goal. Seeking means having a goal. Finding means being free, being open, having no goal. You, Venerable One, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for, striving to reach your goal, you overlook many things that lie close before your eyes."

"Perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find."

"Perhaps, people of our kind can?t love. The childlike people can; that?s their secret."

"Rain: Soft rain, summer rain whispers from bushes, whispers from trees. Oh, how lovely and full of blessing to dream and be satisfied. I was so long in the outer brightness, I am not used to this upheaval: being at home in my own soul, never to be led elsewhere. I want nothing, I long for nothing, I hum gently the sounds of childhood, and I reach home astounded in the warm beauty of dreams. Heart, how torn you are, how blessed to plow down blindly, to think nothing, to know nothing, only to breathe, only to feel."

"Romantic souvenirs had a way of attaching themselves to one when one wanted to move on, but they were not to be taken seriously."

"Right now I had a sudden certainty: each had a mission, but this could not be selected, defined, managed at will. It was wrong to want new gods, and completely false wanting to give something to the world. There was no duty, none, for the conscious man, except that of seeking himself, assert inside, groping for a way forward without worrying about the goal that might lead. That discovery touched me deeply, this was the fruit of that experience. I had often played with images of the future and dreamed of roles that might be intended as a poet perhaps prophet, painter or anything else. Those images were not worth anything. I was not in the world to write, preach or paint; neither I nor anyone was for that. Such things could only rise marginally. The true mission of each was get himself. You could reach or mad poet, a prophet or criminal; this is not a matter of one, after all, lacked any importance. What mattered was to find his own destiny, not a destination either, and live it fully. Everything else were mediocrities, an attempt to escape, to seek refuge in the ideal of mass, was conform; It was fear of one 's own individuality. The new image emerged terrible and sacred in my eyes, I sensed multiple times, perhaps pronounced and many others, but never lived so far. I was a nature project, a project into the unknown, perhaps into the new, perhaps to nothing; and my mission, my only mission was to stop this project welling up from the depths done. Feel me his will and identify with him completely."

"Sadly, I swallowed my tea and stared at the crowd of second-rate elegance."

"Quite a number of people are able to feel the beauty of the world profoundly and vastly, and to carry high, noble images in their souls, but they are unable to exteriorize these images, to create them for the enjoyment of others, to communicate Them."

"Remember, my dear Govinda, the world of appearances is transitory, the style of our clothes and hair is extremely transitory. Our hair and our bodies are themselves transitory."

"Quoth Siddhartha: What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you're searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don't find the time for finding?"

"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."

"Science, to quote your own words, is nothing else than a 'strange hankering after differences'. Her essence could not be better defined. For men of science nothing is so important as the clear definition of differences."

"Search is: have a goal. But find means to be free, open, no destination have... A seeker looks much not what stands close before his eyes."

"Searching means having a goal, but finding means being free, being open, having no goal. You, O worthy one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose."

"See what monkeys we are! Look, such is the man! And at once all renown, all intelligence, all the attainments of the spirit, all progress towards the sublime, the great and the enduring and the man fell away and became a monkey's trick!"

"See: Most men will not swim before they know . Is this not spiritual? They do not want to swim, of course! They were born to earth, not for water. And, of course, they do not want to think, as they have been created for life. Do not to think! Sure, and you think, that makes think the main thing that you can perhaps get very far in this; but that was just confused the earth with water, and one day or another will drown."

"Seeing how people live from day to day in a childish way, or animal, in a way that was dear, but you and despised the same time. He saw how struggling, how poor and how their hair goes gray for some things that he did not seem to merit such a price, for money, for little pleasures, for small honors, I see how they argue and insult each other, see them cry because of pain over a shaman goes with a smile and suffering from some shortcomings that do not even know what a shaman."

"Seeking nothing, emulating nothing, breathing gently, he moved in an atmosphere of imperishable calm, imperishable light, and inviolable peace."

"Sensuality isn't worth a hair more than spirituality, and it's the same the other way around. It's all one, everything is equally good. Whether you embrace a woman or make a poem, it's the same. So long as the main thing is there, the love, the burning, the emotion, it doesn't matter whether you are a monk on Mount Athos or a man about town in Paris."

"Seo's sad, felt in his heart something dies, it's empty, that in front of us there is no joy, no goal. He sat sinking into thoughts and waited. He learned to say one thing: to wait, to be patient and to listen."

"Sentimentality is a basking in feelings that in reality you don't take seriously enough to make the slightest sacrifice to or ever translate into action."

"Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time."

"Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists of putting too high a value on time. In eternity there is no time. Eternity is a moment, just long enough for a joke"