Quote collection
446 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I believe that the struggle against death, the unconditional and self-willed determination to live, is the mode of power behind the lives and activities of all outstanding men."
"Is not every life, every work fine?"
"In the beginning was the myth."
"Every healthy person must have a goal in life and that life must have content."
"Abraxas was the god who was both god and devil."
"The river taught us how to listen with a silent heart, with a waiting open soul."
"Every natural form is latent within us, originates in the soul whose essence is eternity, whose essence we cannot know but which most often intimates itself to us as the power to love and create."
"To nobody can you communicate in words and teachings, what happened to you in your hour of enlightenment."
"Love can be begged, bought, or received as a gift, one can find it in the street, but one cannot steal it."
"The cup was emptied and would never be filled again."
"Art is contemplation of the world in a state of grace and imaginatively reflecting that subjective understanding."
"It was lovely, and tempting, to exert power over men and to shine before others, but power also had its perditions and perils."
"In the beginning was the myth. God, in his search for self-expression, invested the souls of Hindus, Greeks, and Germans with poetic shapes and continues to invest each child's soul with poetry every day."
"You should never be afraid of people... such fear can destroy us completely. You've simply got to get rid of it, if you want to turn into someone decent. You understand that, don't you?"
"Each man carries the vestiges of his birth; the slime and eggshells of his primeval past with him to the end of his days. Some never become human, remaining frog, lizard, ant. Some are human above the waist, fish below."
"Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk."
"Young people have many pleasures and many sorrows, because they only have themselves to think of, so every wish and every notion assume importance; every pleasure is tasted to the full, but also every sorrow, and many who find that their wishes cannot be fulfilled, immediately put an end to their lives."
"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."
"lucid and quiet his voice hovered above the listeners, like a light, like a starry sky."
"At that time two opposing concepts of the Game called forth commentary and discussion. The foremost players distinguished two principal types of Game, the formal and the psychological."