Quote collection
446 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Until 1914 I loved to travel; I often went to Italy and once spent a few months in India. Since then I have almost entirely abandoned travelling, and I have not been outside of Switzerland for over ten years."
"All men of goodwill have this in common - that our works put us to shame."
"When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured."
"Love is stronger than violence."
"They slept profoundly, desperately, greedily, as though for the last time, as though they had been condemned to stay awake forever and had to drink in all the sleep in the world during these last hours."
"And here is a doctrine at which you will laugh. It seems to me, Govinda, that love is the most important thing in the world."
"But one thing this doctrine, so clean, so venerable, does not contain: it does nto contain the secret of what the Sublime One himself experienced, he alone among the hundreds of thousands. This is why I am continuing my wanderings not to seek another, better doctrine, because I know there is none, but to leave behind all the teachings and all teachers, and either attain my goal alone or die."
"All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?"
"Making music together is the best way for two people to become friends."
"When we hate a person, what we hate in his image is something inside ourselves. Whatever isn't inside us can't excite us."
"To die is to go into the Collective Unconscious, to lose oneself in order to be transformed into form, pure form."
"How foolish to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence."
"At one time I had given much thought to why men were so very rarely capable of living for an ideal. Now I saw that many, no, all men were capable of dying for one."
"One cannot apologize for something fundamental, and a child feels and knows this as well and as deeply as any sage."
"Things are going downhill with you!' he said to himself, and laughed about it, and as he was saying it, he happened to glance at the river, and he also saw the river going downhill, always moving on downhill, and singing and being happy through it all."
"The tree does not die, it waits."
"People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer's slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue."
"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."
"Toward seven o'clock every morning, I leave my study and step Out on the bright terrace; the sun already burns resplendent Between the shadows of the fig tree, makes the low wall of coarse Granite warm to the touch. Here my tools lie ready and waiting, Each one an intimate, an ally: the round basket for weeds: The zappetta, the small hoe with a short haft . . . There's a rake here as well, at at times a mattock and spade, Or two watering cans filled with water warmed by the sun. With my basket and small hoe in hand, facing the sun, I Go out for my morning walk."
"For a while I shall still be leaving, looking back at you as you slip away into the magic islands of the mind. But for a while now all are alive, believing that in a single poignant hour we did say all that we could ever say in a great flowing out of radiant power. It was like seeing and then going blind."