Great Throughts Treasury

"To identify the causes, so it seemed to him, is the very essence of thinking, and by this alone sensations turn into realizations and are not lost, but become entities and start to emit like rays of light what is inside of them."

"To listen with a still heart, with a waiting, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgement, without opinions."

"To learn how to love the world, in order to stop comparing it to some world I wished, I imagined, some kind of perfection I had made up, but to leave it as it is and to love it and to enjoy being a part of it.?These, oh Govinda, are some of the thoughts which have come into my mind."

"To stiffen into stone, to persevere! We long forever for the right to stay. But all that stays with us is fear, and we shall never rest upon our way."

"To know an individual is to discover in him those notes that distinguish him from others."

"To recognize causes, it seemed to him, is to think, and through thought alone feelings become knowledge and are not lost, but become real and begin to mature."

"To thoroughly understand the world, to explain it, to despise it, may be the thing great thinkers do. But I'm only interested in being able to love the world, not to despise it, not to hate it and me, to be able to look upon it and me and all beings with love and admiration and great respect."

"To that official and correct part that is in the Bible. I believe that just as the good side of God is praised, it should also be worshiped to that other side, which is said, belongs to the Devil. I think that would be the right thing to do. And if this is not so, we should make a God who united good and bad, and before whom we should not close our eyes to facts so natural and so essential to man."

"To such men the desperate and horrible thought has come that perhaps the whole of human life is but a bad joke, a violent and ill-fated abortion of the primal mother, a savage and dismal catastophe of nature."

"To whom else should one pay honor, but to Him, Atman, the Only One? And where was Atman to be found, where did He dwell, where did His eternal heartbeat, if not within the Self, in the innermost, in the eternal which each person carried within him."

"Today I know very well that nothing in life repulses man so much as to follow the path that leads him to himself."

"Together but all people who are of good will, this. That our works shame us in the end; that we have to start over again and again that the victim must be always brought new."

"Too much thinking was still not good for me."

"To you, differences are quite unimportant; to me, they are what matters most. I am a scholar by nature; science is my vocation. And science is, to quote your words, nothing but the 'determination to establish differences.' Its essence couldn't be defined more accurately. For us, the men of science, nothing is as important as the establishment of differences; science is the art of differentiation. Discovering in every man that which distinguishes him from others is to know him."

"Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life."

"Truly, nothing in the world has occupied my thoughts as much as the Self, this riddle, that I live, that I am one and am separated and different from everybody else, that I am Siddhartha; and about nothing in the world do I know less than about myself, about Siddhartha."

"Troubled, yet with laughter, I recalled that time. He remembered that at that time he had boasted of three things to Kamala, three noble and invincible arts: fasting, waiting and thinking."

"Undo: I love you, I did not say I said just give your hand and welcome me see! You seem to be close to me, you were so young and so good ... I did not say I love you."

"Two thirds of my countrymen read this kind of newspaper, read things written in this tone every morning and every night, are every day worked up and admonished and incited, and robbed of their peace of mind and better feelings by them, and the end and aim of it all is to have the war over again, the next war that draws nearer and nearer, and it will be a good deal more horrible than the last. All that is perfectly clear and simple. Anyone could comprehend it and reach the same conclusion after a moment's reflection. But nobody wants to. Nobody wants to avoid the next war, nobody wants to spare himself and his children the next holocaust if this be the cost. To reflect for one moment, to examine himself for a while and ask what share he has in the world's confusions and wickedness - clearly, nobody wants to do that. And so there's no stopping it, and the next war is being pushed on with enthusiasm by thousands upon thousands day by day."

"Was all that we called culture, spirit, soul, all that we called beautiful and sacred, nothing but a ghost long dead, which only a few fools like us took for true and living? Had it perhaps indeed never been true and living? Had all that we poor fools bothered our heads about never been anything but a phantom?"

"Waiver of today and tomorrow in favor of the perfect, or last, it was sublime kind of escape."

"Was it not comedy, a strange and stupid matter, this repetition, this running around in a fateful circle?"

"Vasudeva listened with great attention. Listening carefully, he let everything enter his mind, birthplace and childhood, all that learning, all that searching, all joy, all distress. This was among the ferryman's virtues one of the greatest: like only a few, he knew how to listen. Without him having spoken a word, the speaker sensed how Vasudeva let his words enter his mind, quiet, open, waiting, how he did not lose a single one, awaited not a single one with impatience, did not add his praise or rebuke, was just listening. Siddhartha felt, what a happy fortune it is, to confess to such a listener, to bury in his heart his own life, his own search, his own suffering."

"Until now you have known that your permitted world was only half the world and you have tried to conceal the other half, as priests and teachers do. But you will not! No one who has begun to think about it can do it."

"Was it not his Self, his small, fearful and proud Self, with which he had wrestled for so many years, but which had always conquered him again, which appeared each time again and again, which robbed him of happiness and filled him with fear?"

"We are in totally different ratios compared to classical music than people in the eras that created it; spiritualized enough reverence and not always free from the mastery of resigned melancholy, cherished by us against true music is totally different naive serene pleasure aroused by music in the times in which he appeared."

"?We all share the same origin, our mothers; all of us come in at the same door."

"We all come out of the same abyss; but each of us, a trial throw of the dice from the depths, strives toward his own goal."

"Was then not all sorrow in time, all self-torment and fear in time? Were not all difficulties and evil in the world conquered as soon as one conquered time, as soon as one dispelled time?"

"We are just a moment in eternity, that will take place as long as a joke."

"We are not blind to the fact that the attempt to somewhat contradict or appear to contradict the laws and customs prevailing in the spiritual life. Because one of the supreme principles of our supreme life just fighting individual, preferably completely classify individuals in the hierarchy of educational authorities and science. Perfect music has its causes. It becomes out of balance. The balance of the station from the true, the right station from the spirit world. Hence the music can only speak to the man who has realized the meaning of the world. Music is based on the harmony between heaven and earth, the consent of darkness and light. I believe that I have not seen as it is beautiful. Ah, yes, maybe it is so because the first time you see it as something we have to leave and what does must forgive. Each of us is just a man, just try. But he needs to be on the road to perfect, should strive towards the center, not the periphery. Remember: a man can be a strict logician or grammarian, and while full of fantasy and music. It can be a musician or a player glass beads, and at the same time all devoted to law and order. The man as we imagine and we want what is to become towards our goal, could each day their science or art to replace each other. From it to the game of glass beads illuminated logic, and grammar and fantasy."

"We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps."

"We are tempted to believe them whim our, own creations, we waver and dissolve the boundary between ourselves and nature, and become conscious of a state of mind where we do not know if the images on our retina come from external or internal impressions. At no other time so easily we discover the extent that we are creators, that our soul is constantly involved in the recreation of life. A same invisible divinity works in us and in nature, and if the outside world disappear, any of us would be able to rebuild it, because the mountains and rivers, trees and leaves, roots and flowers, all created in nature, is already prefigured in us comes from the soul, whose essence is eternal, and beyond our knowledge, but it makes us patent as loving and creative force."

"We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement."

"We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land... each the other?s opposite and complement."

"We can understand one another, but each of us can only interpret himself."

"We are, however, see suicide as redemption in death, not life; they are willing to be eliminated and surrender, die and return to the beginning."

"We are the real wrongdoers. We are the owners of knowledge and thought."

"We cannot provide a definition of those products from which the age takes it name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather chatted about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. The cleverer writers poked fun at their own work. Many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors."

"We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do."

"We consist of everything the world consists of, each of us, and just as our body contains the genealogical table of evolution as far back as the fish and even much further, so we bear everything in our soul that once was alive in the soul of men. Every god and devil that ever existed, be it among the Greeks, Chinese, or Zulus, are within us, exist as latent possibilities, as wishes, as alternatives. If the human race were to vanish from the face of the earth save for one halfway talented child that had received no education, this child would rediscover the entire course of evolution, it would be capable of producing everything once more, gods and demons, paradises, commandments, the Old and New Testament."

"We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don?t mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke."

"We lived like pilgrims and made no use of those contrivances which spring into existence in a world deluded by money."

"We have to get through in the fun and purity of the place after place and should not cherish any place cherished homeland, the spirit of the world does not want to, and our adherence to narrow us, but want to change degree after degree, and expand on us."

"We know from several statements of Knecht's that he wanted to write the former Master's biography, but official duties left him no time for such a task. He had learned to curb his own wishes. Once he remarked to one of his tutors: It is a pity that you students aren't fully aware of the luxury and abundance in which you live. But I was exactly the same when I was still a student. We study and work, don't waste much time, and think we may rightly call ourselves industrious?but we are scarcely conscious of all we could do, all that we might make of our freedom. Then we suddenly receive a call from the hierarchy, we are needed, are given a teaching assignment, a mission, a post, and from then on move up to a higher one, and unexpectedly find ourselves caught in a network of duties that tightens the more we try to move inside it. All the tasks are in themselves small, but each one has to be carried out at its proper hour, and the day has far more tasks than hours. That is well; one would not want it to be different. But if we ever think, between classrooms, Archives, secretariat, consulting room, meetings, and official journeys?if we ever think of the freedom we possessed and have lost, the freedom for self-chosen tasks, for unlimited, far-flung studies, we may well feel the greatest yearning for those days, and imagine that if we ever had such freedom again we would fully enjoy its pleasures and potentialities."

"We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots and executions."

"We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, suffering and shame. In the same way all disrespect for life, all hard-heartedness, all indifference, all contempt is nothing else than killing."

"We might well look for the day when, with wires or without, with or without the disturbance of other sounds, we should hear King Solomon speaking, or Walter von der Vogelweide. And all this, I said, just as today was the case with the beginnings of wireless, would be of no more service to man than as an escape from himself and his true aims, and a means of surrounding himself with an ever closer mesh of distractions and useless activities."

"We marked men were not at all worried about the shape the future would take."

"We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being."