Great Throughts Treasury

"The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer's voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death."

"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."

"The known world shrinks and vanishes, and the soul hurls itself into the uncharted distances of the unknown where everything is strange and yet familiar, and the language of music, of poets, and of dreams is spoken."

"The law? I asked curiously. What law's that, Leo?"

"The law of service. He who wishes to live must serve, but he who wishes to rule does not live long."

"The life of every human being is a path toward the same, try on such a road, a hint towards the aisle have never for a man that was exactly the same and in full, but everyone is trying it - this way clumsy and that ingenious manner, each according to his abilities, and every human being bears the scars his birth - the wife of a primitive past - and remain with him until his last days, and there are those who do not never become human beings, remains a frog, a lizard or an ant. And there is a man in the upper body, and the fish in the lower half, that all of us already one is our mothers, and we all came from the same door, but both of us - struggling to get to his fate, can each of us to understand each other, but none of us do not can explain himself , but for himself."

"The life of every man is a path itself, the attempt of a road, the outline of a path. No man has become completely himself; however, everyone aspires to reach, one blind, the other with more light, each as he can. All carry to the end, the remains of his birth, viscosities and shells of a primary world. Some never become men; they fall into a frog, lizard or ant. Others are half man and half fish. But they are a projection of nature to man. We all share our origins, our mothers; all we come from the same abyss; but each tends to his own goal, as an attempt and a projection from the depths. We can understand each other; but play is something that can only make everyone himself."

"The loneliness of the artist, at all of the talented people who I think is inevitable, no matter whether a happiness and success or not. Also understand and reason properly seems to me that the gifted man with imagination, this loneliness dissimulated possible. Because so inevitable it is that the man with talent noticed the dull, sad stupidity of the average man, sooner or later, so he has to defend himself against this insight, because it would ultimately lead to a lack of love and misanthropy that he could not bear, But the big, often icy solitude of the artist or thinker amid the dozen people is whether concealed or not, always there, it is the price we pay for it, that we have in front of those many expected."

"The life of every man is a way to himself, an attempt at a way, the suggestion of a path. No man has ever been utterly himself, yet every man strives to be so, the dull, the intelligent, each one as best he can. Each man to the end of his days carries round with him vestiges of his birth - the slime and egg-shells of the primeval world. There are many who never become human; they remain frogs, lizards, ants. Many men are human being above and fish below. Yet each one represents an attempt on the part of nature to create a human being."

"The Master and the boy followed each other as if drawn along the wires of some mechanism, until soon it could no longer be discerned which was coming and which going, which following and which leading, the old or the young man. Now it seemed to be the young man who showed honor and obedience to the old man, to authority and dignity; now again it was apparently the old man who was required to follow, serve, worship the figure of youth, of beginning, of mirth. And as he watched this at once senseless and significant dream circle, the dreamer felt alternately identical with the old man and the boy, now revering and now revered, now leading, now obeying; and in the course of these pendulum shifts there came a moment in which he was both, was simultaneously Master and small pupil; or rather he stood above both, was the instigator, conceiver, operator, and onlooker of the cycle, this futile spinning race between age and youth."

"The majority of people in Kamala, are like a falling leaf, caught go into the wind, the air is filtered, back stops, wobbles hitting the right and left in the ground. Few people are as well, similar to the stars, stops moving in a certain trajectory, no side with no wind, the way they follow their own laws and carry themselves."

"The man is a bulb composed of hundreds of shells, fabric of countless threads."

"The master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said: There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht - I can see that they already have begun."

"The mistaken and unhappy notion that a man is an enduring unity is known to you. It is also known to you that a man consists of a multitude of souls, of numerous selves. The separation of the unity of the personality into these numerous pieces passes for madness. Science has invented the name schizomania for it. Science is in this so far right as no multiplicity maybe dealt with unless there be a series, a certain order and grouping. It is wrong insofar as it holds that one only and binding lifelong order is possible for the multiplicity of subordinate selves. This error of science has many unpleasant consequences, and the single advantage of simplifying the work of the state-appointed pastors and masters and saving them the labors of original thought. In consequence of this error many persons pass for normal, and indeed for highly valuable members of society, who are incurably mad; and many, on the other hand, are looked upon as mad who are geniuses...This is the art of life. You may yourself as an artist develop the game of your life and lend it animation. You may complicate and enrich it as you please. It lies in your hands. Just as madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizomania the beginning of all art and all fantasy."

"The morality of artists is replaced by aesthetics."

"The mind cannot live in nature, only against nature, only as its counterpart."

"The music of decline had sounded, as in that wonderful Chinese fable; like a thrumming bass on the organ its reverberations faded slowly out over decades; its throbbing could be heard in the corruption of the schools, periodicals, and universities, in melancholia and insanity among those artists and critics who could still be taken seriously; it raged as untrammeled and amateurish overproduction in all the arts."

"The nature of the kind of yours, men endowed with delicate sense, those of the soul, poets, for whom all life is love we are almost always higher, to us at which dominates the intellect. You are, by your home, from the mother's side. You live in the fullness of being. The power of love, the ability to live intensely things is your lot. We, intellect men, although we often seem to lead you and govern you, we do not live in the integrity of being, we live in abstractions. To you the fullness of life, the juice of fruits, you have the garden of love, the beautiful country of art. You are at home on earth, we in the world of ideas. You run the risk of falling into sensuality, we suffocate in the vacuum. You're an artist, I am a thinker. You sleep on the heart of a mother, I sleep in the desert. Me is the sun that illuminates me, for you shine the moon and stars. These are girls who haunt your dreams; me, these are my students."

"The old man slowly raised himself from the piano stool, fixed those cheerful blue eyes piercingly and at the same time with unimaginable friendliness upon him, and said: Making music together is the best way for two people to become friends. There is none easier. That is a fine thing. I hope you and I shall remain friends. Perhaps you too will learn how to make fugues, Joseph."

"The opposite of every truth is just as true! 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. When the exalted Gotama spoke in his teachings of the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, into deception and truth, into suffering and salvation. It cannot be done differently; there is no other way for him who wants to teach. But the world itself, what exists around us and inside of us, is never one-sided. A person or an act is never entirely Samsara or entirely Nirvana, a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful. It does really seem like this, because we are subject to deception, as if time was something real. Time is not real, Govinda, I have experienced this often and often again. And if time is not real, then the gap which seems to be between the world and the eternity, between suffering and blissfulness, between evil and good, is also a deception."

"The mother of life could be called love or desire; she could also be called death, grave, or decay. Eve was the mother. She was the source of bliss as well as of death; eternally she gave birth and eternally she killed; her love was fused with cruelty. The longer he carried her image within him, the more it became a parable and a sacred symbol to him."

"The old buzzard told me his life's story. I only remember that it was interesting and unusual; I've forgotten all the details."

"The perfect music has a cause. It arises from the balance. The balance comes from the accuracy and correctness of the meaning of the world. So we cannot talk about music with people who understand the meaning of the world."

"The purifications were nice, but they were just water, and didn't wash away sins; they didn't cure the mental thirst or allay his heart's anxiety."

"The purpose and the essential properties were not somewhere behind the things, they were in them, in everything."

"The past is the past: whether it was good or better to him, and was not at all, recognize whether we are for him some sense or do not recognize - all equally devoid of value."

"The person who truly wants nothing except his destiny no longer has others of his own kind; he stands completely alone and has only the chill of outer space around him."

"The realization of what wisdom actually was slowly blossomed and ripened in Siddhartha?and he discovered what the goal of his long search was. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think every moment, while living his life, the thought of oneness, to be able to feel and inhale the oneness. Slowly this blossomed in him, was reflected back at him from Vasudeva?s old, childlike face: harmony, knowledge of the eternal perfection of the world, unity."

"The reason why I do not know anything about myself, the reason why Siddhartha has remained alien and unknown to myself is due to one thing, to one single thing--I was afraid of myself, I was fleeing from myself. I was seeking Atman, I was seeking Brahman, I was determined to dismember myself and tear away its layers of husk in order to find in its unknown innermost recess the kernel at the heart of those layers, the Atman, life, the divine principle, the ultimate. But in so doing, I was losing myself."

"The realms of day and night. Two different worlds coming from two opposite poles mingled during this time."

"The realization that my problem was one that concerned all men, a problem of living and thinking, suddenly swept over me and I was overwhelmed by fear and respect as I suddenly saw and felt how deeply my own personal life and opinions were immersed in the eternal stream of great ideas. Though it offered some confirmation and gratification, the realization was not really a joyful one. It was hard and had a harsh taste because it implied responsibility and no longer being allowed to be a child; it meant standing on one?s own feet."

"The river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and that there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future."

"The right that was never fully Levin in someone else's yard, so forget himself."

"The river?s voice was full of longing, full of smarting woe, full of insatiable desire."

"The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing."

"The scholar who knowingly speaks, writes, or teaches falsehood, who knowingly supports lies and deceptions, not only violates organic principles. He also, no matter how things may seem at the given moment, does his people a grave disservice. He corrupts its air and soil, its food and drink; he poisons its thinking and its laws, and he gives aid and comfort to all the hostile, evil forces that threaten the nation with annihilation."

"The seriousness, my dear, is a note of the time comes, I want to trust, by overestimating the time. I once respected him too much time and wanted to get to a hundred years, however. But in eternity, you know, time does not exist; eternity is only a moment, just enough for a joke."

"The success by something simple and stability in the salvation of mobile."

"The source ran somewhere, far away from him, ran and ran invisibly, had nothing to do with his life any more. And at several times he suddenly became scared on account of such thoughts and wished that he would also be gifted with the ability to participate in all of this childlike-naive occupations of the daytime with passion and with his heart, really to live, really to act, really to enjoy and to live instead of just standing by as a spectator."

"The Steppenwolf, however, first threw up his sharp, closely cropped head and sniffed around nervously before he or she ever made any answer or announced his name. Oh, it smells good here, I Said, and at that I Smiled and my aunt Smiled too."

"The sinner, which I am and which you are, is a sinner, but in times to come he will be Brahma again, he will reach the Nirvana, will be Buddha?and now see: these 'times to come' are a deception, are only a parable! The sinner is not on his way to become a Buddha, he is not in the process of developing, though our capacity for thinking does not know how else to picture these things. No, within the sinner is now and today already the future Buddha, his future is already all there, you have to worship in him, in you, in everyone the Buddha which is coming into being, the possible, the hidden Buddha. The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect, or on a slow path towards perfection: no, it is perfect in every moment, all sin already carries the divine forgiveness in itself, all small children already have the old person in themselves, all infants already have death, all dying people the eternal life"

"The sympathetic but sentimental man who sings the song of the blessed child wants also to nature, to innocence, to the back beginnings and has forgotten that the children are not blessed to many conflicts that they many ambiguities, that they are all suffering capable."

"The teachers apparently regarded a dead student very differently from a living one."

"The time and the world, money and power, belong to be mediocre and bland. For others, the real beings, they own nothing, except the freedom to die. It was so always and it will be so forever."

"The true profession of a man is to find his way to himself."

"The unhappiness that I need and long for is of the kind that will let me suffer with eagerness and die with lust... That is the unhappiness or happiness I am waiting for."

"The things we see are the same things that are within us. There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself. You can be happy that way. But once you know the other interpretation you no longer have the choice of following the crowd. Sinclair, the majority's path is an easy one, ours is difficult."

"The things we see - Pistorious said dully - are the same things we carry in us. No more reality than we have inside. So most humans live so unrealiztically, because he believes that external images are reality and not allow your own inner world manifest. It can be very happy as well, of course. But when you know the other, and you cannot choose the path of the majority. Sinclair, the way most easy, ours, difficult. Let 's walk."

"The vessel was not full, his intellect was not satisfied, his soul was not at peace, his heart was not still."

"The two Samanas recognized him simply by the perfection of his peace, by the stillness of his being in which there was no seeking, no desire, no imitation, no attempts at being seen--only light and peace."