Great Throughts Treasury

"The war against death, dear Harry, is always a beautiful, noble, and wonderful, and glorious thing, and so, it follows, is the war against war. But it is always hopeless and quixotic too."

"The water changed to vapor and rose, became rain and came down again, became spring, brook and river, changed a new, flowed anew."

"The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life."

"The weeks up there were almost the most beautiful in my life. I breathed the pure, clear air, drank the icy water from streams and watched the herds of goats grazing on the steep slopes, guarded by dark-haired, musing goatherds. At times I heard storms resound through the valley and saw mists and clouds at unusually close quarters. In the clefts of rocks I observed the small, delicate, bright colored flowers and the many wonderful mosses, and on clear days I used to like to walk uphill for an hour until I could see the clearly outlined distant peaks of high mountains, their blue silhouettes, and white, sparkling snow fields across the other side of the hill."

"The whole of human life is nothing more than a silly joke, abortion ominous, violent, first to the mother, a natural disaster, dismal and barbaric."

"The words do the secret meaning is not good, there is everything always becomes a bit different when you say it, a little distorted, a little foolish."

"The whole of world history often seems to me nothing more than a picture book which portrays humanity's most powerful and a senseless desire - the desire to forget. Does not each generation, by means of suppression, concealment, and ridicule, efface what the previous generation considered most important?"

"The words are not good for the secret meaning, everything always becomes a bit different, as soon as it is put into words, gets distorted a bit, a bit silly?yes, and this is also very good, and I like it a lot, I also very much agree with this, that this what is one man's treasure and wisdom always sounds like foolishness to another person."

"The Wolf trots to and fro, the world lies deep in snow, the raven from the birch tree flies, but nowhere a hare, nowhere a roe, the roe -she is so dear, so sweet - If such a thing I might surprise in my embrace, my teeth would meet, what else is there beneath the skies? The lovely creature I would so treasure, and feast myself deep on her tender thigh, I would drink of her red blood full measure, then howl till the night went by. Even a hare I would not despise; sweet enough its warm flesh in the night. Is everything to be denied that could make life a little bright? The hair on my brush is getting grey. The sight is failing from my eyes. Years ago my dear mate died. And now I trot and dream of a roe. I trot and dream of a hare. I hear the wind of midnight howl. I cool with the snow my burning jowl, and on to the devil my wretched soul I bear."

"The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment, every sin already carries grace in it."

"The world melted away all around him, when he stood alone like a star in the sky."

"The world wants renewed. It smells of death. There is nothing new without death."

"The world had been divided into two parts that sought to annihilate each other because they both desired the same thing, namely the liberation of the oppressed, the elimination of violence, and the establishment of permanent peace."

"The world is going under, I thought, and this notion so little surprised me, it seemed as though I had been waiting a long time for just that to happen. But now, from amid the burning and collapsing city, I saw a boy come toward me. His hands were buried in his pockets and he hopped and skipped from one leg to another, resilient and light-hearted. Then he stopped and emitted an ingenious whistle -- our signal from grade school days, and the boy was my friend who had shot himself when he was a student. Immediately I too became, like him, a boy of twelve, and the burning city and the distant thunder and the blustering storm of howling voices from all corners of the world sounded wondrously exquisite to our newly awakened ears. Now everything was good, and the dark nightmare in which I had lived for so many despairing years was gone forever."

"The world was beautiful when looked at in this way?without any seeking, so simple, so childlike."

"The world was beautiful when one just looked at it without."

"The world of appearances transient world, but our clothes and we felt transient model to the fullest extent. In fact, we felt our bodies themselves fleeting."

"The world was beautiful, the world was particolored, strange and quizzical... Meaning and essence were not somewhere behind things, they were inside things, in everything."

"The world, Govinda, is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people -- eternal life. It is not possible for one person to see how far another is on the way; the Buddha exists in the robber and dice player; the robber exists in the Brahmin."

"The world was so beautiful when regarded like this, without searching, so simply, in such a childlike way. Moons and stars were beautiful, beautiful were bank and stream, forest and rocks, goat and gold-bug, flower and butterfly. So lovely, so delightful to go through the world this way, so like a child, awake, open to what is near, without distrust."

"Then it seems that I, who wanted to watch over you, fell asleep myself."

"There are a good many people of the same kind as Harry. Many artists are of his kind. These persons all have two souls, two beings within them. Thee is God and the devil in them; the mother's blood and the father's; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the wolf and man in Harry. And these men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment's happiness is flung so high and so dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own."

"Then the Yogi suddenly fell silent, and when I looked puzzled he shrugged and said: ?Don?t you see yourself where the fault lies?? But I could not see it. At this point he recapitulated with astonishing exactness everything he had learned from me by his questioning. He went back to the first signs of fatigue, repugnance, and intellectual constipation, and showed me that this could have happened only to someone who had submerged himself disproportionately in his studies and that it was high time for me to recover my self-control, and to regain my energy with outside help. Since I had taken the liberty of discontinuing my regular meditation exercises, he pointed out, I should at least have realized what was wrong as soon as the first evil consequences appeared, and should have resumed meditation. He was perfectly right. I had omitted meditating for quite a while on the grounds that I had no time, was too distracted or out of spirits, or too busy and excited with my studies. Moreover, as time went on I had completely lost all awareness of my continuous sin of omission. Even now, when I was desperate and had almost run aground, it had taken an outsider to remind me of it. As a matter of fact, I was to have the greatest difficulty snapping out of this state of neglect. I had to return to the training routines and beginners? exercises in meditation in order gradually to relearn the art of composing myself and sinking into contemplation. With a small sigh the Magister ceased pacing the room. That is what happened to me, and to this day I am still a little ashamed to talk about it. But the fact is, Joseph, that the more we demand of ourselves, or the more our task at any given time demands of us, the more dependent we are on meditation as a wellspring of energy, as the ever-renewing concord of mind and soul. And ? I could if I wished give you quite a few more examples of this ? the more intensively a task requires our energies, arousing and exalting us at one time, tiring and depressing us at another, the more easily we may come to neglect this wellspring, just as when we are carried away by some intellectual work we easily forget to attend to the body. The really great men in the history of the world have all either known how to meditate or have unconsciously found their way to the place to which meditation leads us. Even the most vigorous and gifted among the others all failed and were defeated in the end because their task or their ambitious dream seized hold of them, made them into persons so possessed that they lost the capacity for liberating themselves from present things, and attaining perspective. Well, you know all this; it?s taught during the first exercises, of course. But it is inexorably true. How inexorably true it is, one realizes only after having gone astray."

"Then Siddhartha began to understand that his son had not brought him happiness and peace, but suffering and worry. But he loved him, and he preferred the suffering and worries of love over happiness and joy without the boy."

"There are few people who know how to listen and I have not met anybody who can do so like you."

"There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness."

"There are few people who know how to listen to each other. I have never met anyone who knew how to like you. And it will learn from you."

"There are many other small joys, perhaps the especially delightful one of smelling a flower or a piece of fruit, of listening to one?s own or others? voices, of hearkening to the prattle of children. And a tune being hummed or whistled in the distance, and a thousand other tiny things from which one can weave a bright necklace of little pleasures for one?s life."

"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 school master will prefer to have a couple of dumb-heads in class than a ? genius. ? His task is not to produce extravagant intellectuals but good Latinists, mathematicians and sober decent folk. ? We have the consolation that among true geniuses the wounds always heal? 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. ? Time and again the ones who are detested by their teachers? are afterwards the ones who add to society's treasure."

"There are numerous ways in which God can make us lonely and lead us back to ourselves. This is the way He dealt with me at the time. It was like a bad dream."

"There had been a quarrel, she had been hurt, had wept. Now it was over; now she sat still and waited. Life would go on. As with children. As with animals. If only you did not talk, did not make simple things complicated, did not turn your soul inside out."

"There is much that I could say about the happy and tender incidents in my childhood days, the sense of security which I enjoyed with my parents, my childish affections and carefree, irresponsible existence in a gentle and affectionate ambience. But my interest is reserved for the steps that I took in my life towards self-realization. All the pleasant points of repose, islands of happiness, paradises whose magic was not unknown to me can remain, as far as I am concerned, in the enchanted distance; for it is not a world that I have any particular desire to re-enter."

"There is always a group of such people who ask for the height of life, however, are unable to understand."

"There is good and reason in us ? with whom fortune plays, and we can be stronger than ? fate, if only for a few hours? We can draw closer to one another in times of need, understand and love one another, and live to comfort each other."

"There is no love makes us happy, but I think that love is found to show us the extent of our strength on the suffering and the possibility."

"There is no escape. You can't be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don't try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is- particularly the artist- particularly myself!"

"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."

"There is nothing in this world more miserably than that man thinks of something everyone loves. Those ideas are similar to some of the popular and military touting the thousands of things."

"There is, in fact, no way back either to the wolf or to the child. From the very start there is no innocence and no singleness. Every created thing, even the simplest, is already guilty, already multiple. It has been thrown into the muddy stream of being and may never more swim back again to its source. The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life. Nor will suicide really solve your problem... You will, instead, embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace. This is the road that Buddha and every great man has gone, whether consciously or not, insofar as fortune has favored his quest."

"There was only greed for living and dread, and out of dread, out of stupid childish dread of the cold, of loneliness, of death, two people fled to one another, kissed, embraced, rubbed cheek to cheek, put leg to leg, Cast new human beings into the world. That was how it was."

"There was once a man, Harry, called the Steppenwolf. He went on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in reality a wolf of the steppes. He had learned a good deal of all that people of a good intelligence can, and was a fairly clever fellow. What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life."

"There were now and then, though rarely, the hours that brought the welcome shock, pulled down the walls and brought me back again from my wanderings to the living heart of the world. Sadly and yet deeply moved, I set myself to recall the last of these experiences. It was at a concert of lovely old music. After two of 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."

"There was nothing left for him, except to annihilate himself, except to smash the failure into which he had shaped his life, to throw it away, before the feet of mockingly laughing gods."

"There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge-that is everywhere, that is Atman, that is in me and you and in every creature, and I am beginning to believe that this knowledge has no worse enemy than the man of knowledge, than learning."

"There?s a big difference between merely carrying the world inside you and knowing that you do! A madman can produce ideas that resemble Plato?s, and a pious little schoolboy in a Herrnhut institute can creatively reconstruct profound mythological associations in his mind, ideas to be found in the Gnostics or Zoroaster. But he doesn?t know he?s doing it! He?s a tree or a stone, at best an animal, just as long as he doesn?t know that. But when the first spark of that knowledge glimmers, he becomes a human being. You certainly don?t consider all the bipeds running around the street to be human beings merely because they walk upright and carry their young for nine months? After all, you see how many of them are fish or sheep, worms or leeches, how many are ants, how many are bees! Now, each one of them has the potentiality of becoming a human being, but only when he senses that potential, when he even learns to be conscious of it to some degree, does that potential belong to him."

"Therefore, I see whatever exists as good, death is to me like life, sin like holiness, wisdom like foolishness, everything has to be as it is, everything only requires my consent, only my willingness, my loving agreement, to be good for me, to do nothing but work for my benefit, to be unable to ever harm me."

"Therefore it seems to me that everything that exists is good - death as well as life, sin as well as holiness, wisdom as well as folly. Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding, then all is well with me and nothing can harm me. I learned through my body and soul that it was necessary for me to sin, that I needed lust, that I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of desired imaginary world, some imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to love it and be glad to belong to it."

"There's no reality except the one contained within us. That's why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself."

"These are people who have in them two souls, two essences in them the divine and the diabolical, the mother's blood and the father 's blood, the gift of happiness and the gift of suffering, co-exist and interpenetrate so hostile and disorderly as the wolf and man in Harry."

"These atrocities are in fact not. A man of the Middle Ages would have very different cruel appalling and barbaric detest the whole style of modern life,! Every time, every culture, every custom and tradition has its style has its proper softnesses and curing, beauty and cruelty, has identified certain ailments for granted, takes some evil out patiently. For real suffering, the hell are we. Human life only where two cultures and religions overlap each other... There are now times when an entire generation so gets into it between two times, between two lifestyles that their every matter of course, every custom, every security and innocence is lost."