Quote

• The ‘suicide’ is a person possessed by a feeling of guilt over individuation, a person, that is, who no longer sees the purpose of life in the completion and realization of his own self, but in his own dissolution, in a return to the mother, to God, to the All. Most people of this disposition are actually quite incapable of ever committing suicide, because they recognize too deeply that suicide is a sin.

• He has in him strong potentialities for either a saint or a profligate, yet owing to some weakness or laziness he cannot make the leap into the free and wild spaces, but remains captive to the heavy, burdensome, yet comforting star of the bourgeoisie. (…) Most intellectuals and artists belong to this type. Only the strongest among them break through the atmosphere of the bourgeois earth and reach the cosmos; all the others resign themselves or compromise, and while they despise the bourgeoisie, they belong to it, and in the end, in order to survive, they affirm that society, thereby strengthening and glorifying it.”

• Humor alone, that magnificent discovery of those who are cut short in their calling to highest things, those who are almost saints and almost profligates, humor alone embraces all areas of human existence, and integrates them with the light that passes through its prism.
  To live in the world as though it were not the world, to respect the law and yet to stand above it, to possess as though one possessed not, to renounce as though it were no renunciation—all these favorite and often formulated propositions of a high wisdom of life can be realized only by humor.

• All so-called ‘explanations’, psychological analyses, and attempts at understanding require auxiliary means, theories, myths, fictions (…)—when I say ‘above’ or ‘below’, that is already a statement that requires explanation. For ‘above’ and ‘below’ exist only in thought, only in abstraction; the world itself knows no ‘above’ or ‘below’.

• The sympathetic but sentimental man who sings of happy childhood wants to return to nature, to innocence, to the source, completely forgetting that children too are by no means happy, and are capable of many conflicts, many discords, and much suffering.

• All the great ones among men, Buddha included, have trodden this path, some consciously, some unconsciously. It means being torn away from the unity and being separated, drawing new boundaries against God and isolating oneself; it means a new birth in suffering. To return to the All, to dissolve the painful individuation, to become God, means to expand the soul until it can once more embrace all things.

• I cannot deny that each time my life was so shaken, I gained something at the end. It was something like freedom, spirit, and depth, but also solitude, a feeling of being misunderstood, and coldness.

• Ah, they were right, always right. It was right to live like that, to play at their little games and pursue their little important affairs, instead of staring into the emptiness, despairing and resisting this mechanical movement that makes one so melancholy, like me, who am out of my orbit.

• Seriousness, my boy, is a matter of time. I must tell you this: seriousness arises from overestimating time.

• If I am pleasing and important to you, it is because I am a kind of mirror for you, because there is something in me that understands you and can give you answers.
  In reality, all people are mirrors for one another, responding and answering one another.

• Whether it comes from a high wisdom or from a very simple innocence, life can never harm a person who knows how to live in the moment like that, who lives so in the present and knows how to value, kindly and attentively, every little flower by the wayside, every little playful value of the moment.

• Anyone who wants to enjoy his life today must not be a person like you or me. Whoever wants music instead of jargon, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of money, real work instead of business, passion instead of playing around, for him this beautiful world is no home.

• The world is always the same, past or future; time and the world, money and power belong to the mediocre and the shallow, while to the true, real human beings, nothing is given—except death.

• In the kingdom of eternity, there is no posterity, there is only the now.

• There is no one to lead us. Our only guide is our homesickness.

• You know now where this other world is, and that what you seek is the world of your own spirit. That other reality for which you long exists only within your own interior.

• You yourself can set up the game of life as you please, and breathe life into it. You can complicate it, you can enrich it; it is in your hands.
  Just as madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so schizophrenia is the beginning of all art, of all fantasy.

• The piece which today grows to a terrible monster and spoils the game, you can degrade tomorrow to a minor role, and the poor, lovely piece that seems momentarily in distress and misfortune, you can make a princess in the next game.