Great Throughts Treasury

"Teachers dread nothing so much as unusual characteristics in precocious boys during the initial stages of their adolescence. A certain streak of genius makes an ominous impression on them, for there exists a deep gulf between genius and the teaching profession. Anyone with a touch of genius seems to his teachers a freak from the very first. As far as teachers are concerned, they define young geniuses as those who are bad, disrespectful, smoke at fourteen, fall in love at fifteen, can be found at sixteen hanging out in bars, read forbidden books, write scandalous essays, occasionally stare down a teacher in class, are marked in the attendance book as rebels, and are budding candidates for room-arrest. A schoolmaster will prefer to have a couple of dumb-heads in his class than a single genius, and if you regard it objectively, he is of course right. His task is not to produce extravagant intellects but good Latinists, arithmeticians and sober decent folk. The question of who suffers more acutely at the other's hands - the teacher at the boy's, or vice versa - who is more of a tyrant, more of a tormentor, and who profanes parts of the other's soul, student or teacher, is something you cannot examine without remembering your own youth in anger and shame. yet that is not what concerns us here. We have the consolation that among true geniuses the wounds almost always heal. As their personalities develop, they create their art in spite of school. Once dead, and enveloped by the comfortable nimbus of remoteness, they are paraded by the schoolmasters before other generations of students as showpieces and noble examples. Thus the struggle between rule and spirit repeats itself year after year from school to school. The authorities go to infinite pains to nip the few profound or more valuable intellects in the bud. And time and again the ones who are detested by their teachers are frequently punished, the runaways and those expelled, are the ones who afterwards add to society's treasure. But some - and who knows how many? - waste away quiet obstinacy and finally go under."

"Tegularius was a willful, moody person who refused to fit into his society. Every so often he would display the liveliness of his intellect. When highly stimulated he could be entrancing; his mordant wit sparkled and he overwhelmed everyone with the audacity and richness of his sometimes somber inspirations. But basically he was incurable, for he did not want to be cured; he cared nothing for co-ordination and a place in the scheme of things. He loved nothing but his freedom, his perpetual student status, and preferred spending his whole life as the unpredictable and obstinate loner, the gifted fool and nihilist, to following the path of subordination to the hierarchy and thus attaining peace. He cared nothing for peace, had no regard for the hierarchy, hardly minded reproof and isolation. Certainly he was a most inconvenient and indigestible component in a community whose idea was harmony and orderliness. But because of this very troublesomeness and indigestibility he was, in the midst of such a limpid and prearranged little world, a constant source of vital unrest, a reproach, an admonition and warning, a spur to new, bold, forbidden, intrepid ideas, an unruly, stubborn sheep in the herd."

"That I know nothing about myself, that Siddhartha has remained thus alien and unknown to me, stems from one cause, a single cause: I was afraid of myself, I was fleeing from myself! I searched Atman, I searched Brahmin, I was willing to dissect myself and peel off all of its layers, to find the core of all peels in its unknown interior, the Atman, life, the divine part, the ultimate part. But I have lost myself in the process."

"Tears are ice that melts the soul."

"Thankfully you tune the strings of your moldering lyre to a moderated, to a passably joyful, nay, to an even delighted psalm of thanksgiving and with it bore your quiet, flabby and slightly stupefied half-and-half god of contentment; and in the thick warm air of a contented boredom and very welcome painlessness the nodding mandarin of a half-and-half god and the nodding middle-aged gentleman who sings his muffled psalm look as like each other as two peas."

"That is just what life is when it is beautiful and happy - a game! Naturally, one can also do all kinds of other things with it, make a duty of it, or a battleground, or a prison, but that does not make it any prettier."

"That is why each of us has to find out for himself what is permitted and what is forbidden--forbidden for him. It's possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard. And vice versa. Actually it's only a question of convenience. Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them; things are forbidden to them that every honorable man will do any day in the year and other things are allowed to them that are generally despised. Each person must stand on his own feet."

"That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged ? to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony."

"That is the way leaves fall around a tree in autumn, a tree unaware of the rain running down its sides, of the sun or the frost, and of life gradually retreating inward. The tree does not die. It waits."

"That is why we were drawn to one another and why we are brother and sister. I am going to teach you to dance and play and smile, and still not be happy. And you are going to teach me to think and to know and yet not be happy. Do you know that we are both children of the Devil?"

"That is why the citizens burns today as heretics, depends to a criminal, he is tomorrow monuments."

"That man is not yet a finished creation but rather a challenge of the spirit; a distant possibility dreaded as much as it is desired; that the way towards it has only been covered for a short distance and with terrible agonies and ecstasies even by those few for whom it is the scaffold today and the monument tomorrow - all this the Steppenwolf, too, suspected."

"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."

"That last thing is what you can't get. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all."

"That look said, ?Look, these monkeys are we look, this is the man. And celebrity; discreetly, all the conquests of the spirit, all progress towards the great, the sublime and the eternal within the human, they came ashore and were a game of monkeys.?"

"The ability to cherish the ?little joy? is intimately connected with the habit of moderation. For this ability, originally natural to every man, presupposes certain things which in modern daily life have largely become obscured or lost, mainly a measure of cheerfulness, of love, and of poesy. These little joys ? are so inconspicuous and scattered so liberally throughout our daily lives that the dull minds of countless workers hardly notice them. They are not outstanding, they are not advertised, they cost no money!"

"The air and earth had lived in response to his dreams and desires... Come today... this world belonged to him as much as any owners of these houses and gardens."

"That's the way it is when you love. It makes you suffer, and I have suffered much in the years since. But it matters little that you suffer, so long as you feel alive with a sense of the close bond that connects all living things, so long as love does not die!"

"That's what you can perform actions, and with Two souls, alas! Through activities out of business words, they show that a majority of the bourgeoisie is cowardly surprising and sad as love. One the ability to understand the Buddha, a knowledge of the heaven and hell of being a human person, the common sense in a world where sovereign democracy and bourgeois culture actually need to live, cowardice is from alone if alive. Such a compressed size of his bourgeois existence Have found the room too narrow, right in the wolf u held responsible, the wolf does not want to know that sometimes the best part of being counted. Whatever Contents behalf wild entity have interests saying wolf in all, treacherous, dangerous, bourgeois nightmare to see all of them, but those people who believe that an artist is and equipped with fine feeling, in more than wolves, that many animals live in the back of the wolf, his biting midges every creature that is, as well as fox wolf, dragon, tiger, monkey and bird of paradise also could not see the host itself."

"The best for a person to die at the hands of fascists that is transformed into a fascist."

"The artistically inclined delight in the Game because it provides opportunities for improvisation and fantasy. The strict scholars and scientists despise it ? and so do some musicians also ? because, they say, it lacks that degree of strictness which their specialties can achieve. Well and good, you will encounter these antinomies, and in time you will discover that they are subjective, not objective ? that, for example, a fancy-free artist avoids pure mathematics or logic not because he understands them and could say something about them if he wished, but because he instinctively inclines toward other things. Such instinctive and violent inclinations and disinclinations are signs by which you can recognize the pettier souls. In great souls and superior minds, these passions are not found. Each of us is merely one human being, merely an experiment, a way station. But each of us should be on the way toward perfection, should be striving to reach the center, not the periphery. Remember this: one can be a strict logician or grammarian, and at the same time full of imagination and music. One can be a musician or Glass Bead Game player and at the same time wholly devoted to rule and order. The kind of person we want to develop, the kind of person we aim to become, would at any time be able to exchange his discipline or art for any other. He would infuse the Glass Bead Game with crystalline logic, and grammar with creative imagination. That is how we ought to be. We should be so constituted that we can at any time be placed in a different position without offering resistance or losing our heads."

"The bird breaks the shell. The shell is the world . Whoever wants to be born, you must destroy a world. The bird flies to God. God is called Abraxas ."

"The bird is fighting its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wishes to be born must destroy a world. The bird is flying to God. The god is named Abraxas."

"The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire."

"The beautiful and the most beautiful exhibitions of the courtyard has since becoming a history and displayed on the face of the earth. This we know everything and we mourn him, and not try to change it serious, because there is no way to change it."

"The bourgeois today burns as heretics and hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments tomorrow."

"The bright and clear mirror of my soul was often blurred by a kind of melancholy, but for now it had not been seriously damaged. She appeared from time to time, for a day or a night, as a dreamy and lonely sadness; Disappeared without trace, returning after a few weeks or months. Gradually I became accustomed to her, as a friend and confidant, not receiving her as a torment, but as an uneasy tiredness that never ceased to have its charm. When she surprised me at night, I stood instead of sleeping for hours at the window, staring at the lake in the darkness, the silhouettes of the mountains drawn in the sky and high above the beautiful stars. Then I often had a sweet and vigorous feeling, As if I were contemplated by all that beauty of the night, with a fair censure. As if stars, mountains and lakes aspired for someone who understood their beauty and the suffering of their quiet nature and expressed it, as if I were that being and as if that were my true mission. To give, in poetry, an expression to the mute nature. How that was possible I do not know, I never thought of it, I just felt that the beautiful and stern night waited for me, impatient, in a silent longing."

"The citizens now appreciates nothing higher than I (a rudimentary developed I however). At the expense of intensity so it reaches conservation and security, rather than God obsession he reaps peace of conscience, rather than pleasure-being, instead of freedom convenience, instead of deadly glow a pleasant temperature. The citizen is therefore by its very nature a creature of weak life driving, anxious, even fearing easy to govern any disclosure of his. He has therefore set in place of the power of the majority, instead of violence, the law, instead of the responsibility the voting procedure."

"The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation."

"The clearest relationships were distorted, the most obvious were forgotten, the trivial and unimportant pushed into the foreground. It must be written again, right from the beginning."

"The devil has spit in the soup. Nothing comes out even. Nothing sounds right. Nothing rejoices and warms. Everything is desolate, sad, foul. All strings out of tune. All colors faded."

"The drunkard does indeed find escape, he does indeed find short respite and rest, but he returns from the illusion and finds everything as it was before. He has not grown wiser, he has not gained knowledge, he has not climbed any higher."

"The dream of death is only the dark smoke under which the fires of life are burning."

"The cup was emptied and would never be filled again."

"The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes almost arrogant. You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine's Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world's puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies."

"The fact that the student has experienced happiness only in dreams, is certainly not a slowdown, because most people experience their dreams more violent than their lives."

"The face struck me at that moment as neither masculine nor childlike, neither old nor young, but somehow a thousand years old, somehow timeless, bearing the scars of an entirely different history than we knew."

"The feeling swept over me that I was not born for a normal life at home among my people or in cities and houses."

"The eternal meditation on the causes sadness and inability my life was sterile and tiresome. I was still feeling that they are not over and worn, but I was full of dark impulses. Among other things, I had the thought to keep me as a very special man, whose sufferings nobody understands, knows or shares. Evil in melancholy is that it makes not only sick, but also imagined and view short or even haughty."

"The father touched Siddhartha's shoulder. 'You will go into the forest, he said, and become a Samana. If you find bliss in the forest, come back and teach it to me. If you find disillusionment, come back, and we shall again offer sacrifices to the gods together. Now go."

"The freedom to... regard the future as the hope and product of my own strength and not as something fashioned by some strange power from above."

"The First Flowers: Beside the brook toward the willows, during these days so many yellow flowers have opened their eyes into gold. I have long since lost my innocence, yet a memory touches my depth, the golden hours of morning, and gazes brilliantly upon me out of the eyes of flowers. I was going to pick flowers; now I leave them all standing and walk home, an old man."

"The feeling of this both being present and at the same time real, the feeling of eternity, completely filled every aspect of his being. Deeply he felt, more deeply than ever before, in this hour, the indestructibility of every life, the eternity of every moment."

"The goal is to place myself where I can serve better, where my way of being, my qualities and gifts can find more favorable ground, the best field of action."

"The headmaster? pledged that, provided he behaved himself, he would be duly sheltered and cared for by the state for the rest of his days. It did not occur to any of the boys, nor their fathers, that all this would perhaps not really be free."

"The golden trail was blazed and I was reminded of the eternal, of Mozart, of the stars. For an hour I could breathe again and live and face existence, without having to suffer torment, fear or shame."

"The high value put on every minute of time, the idea of ??hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy."

"The ideas we really live have any value."

"The horrors of the Middle Ages were really nonexistent. A man of the Middle Ages would detest the whole mode of our present-day life as something far more than horrible, far more than barbarous. Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilization. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence. Naturally, everyone does not feel this equally strongly. A nature such as Nietzsche's had to suffer our present ills more than a generation in advance. What he had to go through alone and misunderstood, thousands suffer today."

"The human attitude of which classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over blind chance. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful serenity."