Quotes by Weöres Sándor

"

Let not your love be like hunger, greedily choosing between the edible and the inedible; but like light, shedding its light with serenity on all before it. When love begins to choose: it is no longer love, but a duality of craving and disgust.

"

I sit on the edge of the sea of ​​secrets and dangle my feet in it.

"

Where there was a forest in me: an army of buzzards and birds homeless from the fire of lightning; and my hut will collapse if you haven't found your home in it.

"

Most of today's people look at the world in the way of sentimental novels: wherever their desires lead them and those who help these desires are the good ones; the inhibitors of his desires are the bad ones.

"

I always burn in Cupid's arms, Soul and Love can never be separated.

"

The piney, green forest is whispering, Santa Claus is coming. The nimble sleigh bell falls silent, The year is coming to an end.

"

Mix your heart with the rays of the sun, make a flower of flame out of it, and the one who carries it on your chest on the ground and can withstand the heat, He is your partner.

"

You brought me to life, now I live wounded, If I don't wait for you, I cry; and when I wait for you, I'm afraid.

"

All greatness is also smallness, because there is something bigger, or if there isn't, it can be.

"

What you don't trust to solid stone, model it from the air.

"

Who thinks what, I am what... Why do you think you're eccentric and unrelated? You see a sign gathering on my forehead: You are the one who draws this sign. And be careful that he plays in light or shadow, Because his light and shadow radiates to you. You judge me as a sage, a bird: You see a law about yourself in me.

"

I don't need to know my purpose because my purpose knows me.

"

Because what has once taken place cannot be altered by any order, neither by God nor by devils: it appears to be transient and eternal.

"

It doesn't matter how great your abilities are: the main thing is to make the best of them and through them.

"

Don't keep life away from you by hiding from it, because it creeps up on you unnoticed or crushes your hiding place unexpectedly.

"

Man is the only one who, by himself, digs beneath the individual and conditional things, to the common and unconditional existence: he has a soul.

"

As long as you wither with desire: the rose will not be yours. Take the example of the thrush, it makes a merry noise among the foliage: "I spent with my song, I got drunk with dew, I was satisfied with cool figs: could you not love it?"

"

I poor fool, what am I quarreling with you here? Your face is porcelain, your hands and feet are wooden stakes, you are a puppet, nothing else...

"

I'm tired of every part of me, my stomach, my head. One day maybe a strange face will look at me from the mirror.

"

It would be nice to put fate aside, to be reborn as a flake of your dream. If I could live in my dream again, I would cry a little to make you squeal, laugh a little to make you babble, and then I would quietly fall asleep again.

"

A person becomes a person when he illuminates himself to the depths and emits a ray of inner light to his surroundings.

"

It's foolish to wait for tomorrow, live outside of time as much as you can.

"

The minute is dark. The boo is even darker when locked in the minute, like a beetle in amber.

"

From the frost, there is a dream, snow circulates between the branches. The holiday of Christmas is walking among the trees.

"

Then if I live in the body of a poplar tree, I will sprinkle you with vibrating leaves, then if I become a shadow, I tempt you, if I become a coffin, I hide you, if I become fire, I warm you, if I become light, I bless you, I am human and I love you, why did I hurt you?

"

If they put us in the ground, I will love you there too, I will wash you with an autumn shower, kiss you with wild grape leaves.

"

I thought of your heart as a small candle, which is happy even for a fly - now I feel, in pitch darkness, that it is surrounded by a forest of flames. I'm cold, there's not even a faint breath, everything is bare, dry, dead. Now that your love is running out, I only know now: how much it was.

"

The only way out of the flood of lies is the one that seems the most false: imagination.

"

The Earth, where life is born, is the all-absorbing grave.

"

Break down your individuality and don't be afraid of losing anything: because if you expel the unwashed, you will find the washed in its place. Disintegrate your individuality and the infinite currents of your soul become free, which are neither inside you nor outside you, they permeate everything.

"

What (...) is art? - Is this something infinitely free, which does not have a single unconditional constraint, but in its boundless freedom can tolerate any constraint? A human expression captured in beauty.

"

If you look at your loved one who you love: isn't it you? If a beggar steps on your doorstep, the one you kick out: isn't it you?

"

I don't know yet how much you are to me, (...) I only know that my heart never waited for a companion, and you became its companion at the same time.

"

Ady opened a new field for my eyes, Babits taught me the taste of the song, and Kosztolányi so that I wouldn't bow to the cord fashion that wanted this and that.

"

A fruitful branch, you, good mother, the first woman of my life, a big warm flower bed, a place for a pillow, a cup filled with morning dew.

"

Your voice is the most beautiful when it is the frame of silence, your hair is the most beautiful when it is the servant of the sun's rays, your face is the most beautiful when I remember it crying, your destiny is the most beautiful when it flies away like the song.

"

Your kiss turns the sky blue, the trees turn green from the color of your eyes. Without you, all picture frames are empty and the whole world is lightless.

"

A lamp does not see its own light, honey does not feel its own sweetness.

"

There is only one command, the rest are just advice: try to feel, think and act in such a way that you are in the best interest of everything.

"

If you strive to follow the eternal measure: do not be offended by those who do not strive for this, but whose aspirations waveringly branch between the various finite and changing measures. Look not at what they don't have, but at what they have; because even the most miserable person has a spiritual treasure that you lack. Anyone can object and be arrogant; learn to learn from everyone.

"

Christmas is coming, New Year is coming. While the field freezes and gets cold, the green pine forest just shines.

"

Oh, if I were a star in the round sky, My yellow light would trickle down to earth - Alas, but I would never go back from there, Without my mother I would always cry.

"

God be with you: endless tears; God in you: endless smile.

"

Who you were yesterday: you are not you today. Who you will be tomorrow: you are not yet you today. Only the deception of memory makes continuous death a life.

"

Thought is complex and can be said, truth is simple and unspeakable.

"

I have no ears anymore, yet talk to me, I understand you perfectly. As long as I was alive, I couldn't understand you, you have so many desires, knives and injuries, so many obsessions, of course for me too: two fools. But if you ask me now, my gömböly silence will answer.

"

Be careful whether you think light or dark; because what you thought you created.

"

The main enemy of love is not hatred, but sentimental kindness; patriotism is not the denial of one's country, but dignified leechism and self-sacrifice; the morality of love is not amorous immorality, but social decency, which, while it pursues undisguised lust, offers a hundred kinds of freaks as a substitute for lust.

"

Sin is most dangerous not when it openly and boldly opposes virtue, but when it disguises itself as virtue.

"

If you go to hell, go to the bottom: that's already heaven. Because everything comes around.

"

If you indulge your desires: they will marry and have children. If you kill your desires: they come back as ghosts. If you tame your desires: you can yoke them and plow and sow with dragons like perfect power itself.

"

Loneliness: great company; abandonment requires at least two.

"

Break down your personality and the world will fall into you. Break apart the world that has become your person and completeness will flow into you.

"

Only for that one day It was worth being born, When I could love, And I didn't ask if they loved me.

"

You see yourself in the lake of my eyes: Like your mirror, I am your most loyal friend.

"

Swear if you see fit, curse people and the world, if your cursing is beautiful: I enjoy it. But I don't believe that anyone here on earth would be at fault.

"

The whole being: lifeless. Absolute eternal existence: timeless. The entire operation: unchanged. Total power: powerless. Complete knowledge: without data. Complete wisdom: thoughtless. Complete love: emotionless. Total goodness: directionless. Complete happiness: joyless. The full sound: no sound.

"

Scatter your treasures - let the wealth be you. Spread out your decorations - let the beauty be you. Forget about your entertainment - let the fun be you. Burn your books - wisdom is to be yourself. Waste your muscles - be yourself. Put out your flames - let love be you. Get rid of your pity - the goodness is to be yourself. Break through your barriers - be yourself in the world. Take your life and death together - the completeness, be yourself.

"

I once wanted to be a master too; oh that I could be a good servant! Alas, there is only one servant: God, and infinity is teeming with masters.

"

In the end we all leave, the sunshine is gone and we walk behind the stars on the tires of heaven, above towers, some still look back and want to see a fallen apple in the garden, or maybe a cradle by the door, under a red umbrella, but it's too late, let's come as we are the bells are ringing, we all walk differently behind the stars, on the empty circle, as many as we are finally together like this, we all leave.

"

Realize that the eardrum sings well, the dog barks well, the lamb eats the grass well, the man the lamb and the grass the human corpse: everything is in its place, everything dances its dance perfectly and there is no excellence. The harmony is complete and undisturbed.

"

The past and the future are just two bags under the arms of humanity: one contains memories, the other contains prophecies, both obviously untrue.

"

What do I care if my work is worthwhile or aimless? I am a stream: should I ask where I carry my foam?

"

What is the future? Still unused, pure emptiness, painted by our imagination for good or bad, Let's work and play only in the "now", never in the "later", because we can't guess what the new millennium will bring: a strontium bomb? Earth, water, air death by pyre or is there sanity, persistence, vitality?

"

Humanity will prosper if it stands on the only sane, reliable foundation: if it satisfies its needs and not its passions, desires for revenge, and obsessions.

"

Happiness is never the main thing, never the goal, just a place to rest. To make your whole last, all the parts alternate. The goal is not to calm down: let everything that lives move.

"

If you get in the car, don't mind if someone else pulls up in front of you, you won't be late for anything; but in the scramble you miss peace.

"

For me, there is only one person: Jesus. Jesus exists and he exists in all who exist in him and through him. I write because I want to express the identity with Jesus in me and in others more precisely. I whistle at how many people read or don't read my poems. My only goal: to bring the well-intentioned, sensitive reader one step closer to this identity, to unity with Jesus.

"

Time does not move; motionless: since and as long as the world exists, the presence is unchanged, it is always NOW.

"

The event comes and goes, and the memory is a hundred years old.

"

Time is counterfeit enough for those few who saw it as gold.

"

When you see a dense field of wheat, do you think how many seeds had to die in order for them to sprout? Then they harvest the wheat, it becomes food and returns to the earth. To perish as a germ, or to shine in full bloom: it doesn't really matter. "Whatever": this is the true name of existence. For everyday life, this teaching is invalid. But you, who have reached the point of complete hopelessness: if you are uncertain about anything, before you look for a solution, remember: It doesn't matter.

"

The big turning point in a person's life: "what's in it for me?" instead of: "what comes out of me?" And that's enough to make it shiny from the inside and constantly clean.

"

Learn to read your heart.

"

I can't be honest, maybe because I don't want to, I just chase words like angels with clouds.

"

My eyes only sometimes touch the world, but my heart lives in a thousand places at once.

"

Do you want to love like this - so carefully? you will freeze from your own ice, you child! What's the point of saying "I love you" a hundred times if all your words are without fire?

"

Peoples who get along with themselves and others live richly even on the back of the ice. Violent powers languish in hunger and terror even among the free fruits of the earth.

"

Oh, if I were you, I would go on a journey, I would sing in a flowing stream - every night I would return to my mother's window in a crumb.

"

Don't wish for what is usually called eternal fame, immortality, because you gain nothing from it if your memory remains in the memory of future generations even after your death, like a withered mummy in a pyramid. What is said to be the immortality of great people is not eternal life, not even eternal memory, but oblivion postponed until a few hundred or a few thousand years later.

"

If you individually recognize your unchanging basic layer: your timeless-boundless being, in which lies the eternal measure; and its temporal, finite garment: your multi-faceted individuality, in which the occasional needs lie: it is your way to be guided by your eternal being and not by your ever-changing individuality.

"

True love, like sunshine, doesn't feel sorry for anyone, it doesn't offer itself to anyone. To whom it belongs; friend, enemy: it doesn't matter to him, he has no interest and is not tempted by anything.

"

Suffering is also a luxury. He who does not have too much physical suffering deserves to suffer spiritually.

"

Realize that you are selfish and cannot be otherwise. If you give money to the beggar, at best you do it so that you can enjoy the panorama of your own kindness. Love is also selfish. There is also the feeling that you love your relatives more than others: the instinct connects you to them and you take care of them because it would hurt you if you missed the needs of your loved ones. Realize that no matter what you do, you can't do it out of anything but selfishness - don't even want to be selfless, it's a shame for the gas. Be a whole person within the framework of selfishness.

"

The shadow of the swing of truth on the wall. There is, but you can never determine exactly which part of the wall it reaches.

"

How much we talk about rationality! And how passions decide! But most of the time it's not even the passions, but the blind earthworm reflexes of animal struggles and well-being.

"

Dust is in a hurry. The stone hits him.

"

You can expect as much as you want from life, but equip yourself in such a way that the opposite does not arrive unprepared.

"

You are the hunter and you are the wild and far away, the mighty: that is also you. He is indifference with a rigid glitter up there, and his fate-enveloped being here is a tremor that never rests, and the two faces: the True and the Existent turn intoxicated, like the Sun and the sea looking at each other with radiant love.

"

Your life would be very boring if you always had everything you wanted.

"

Think of life as a game that goes to waste: you can't lose more than your own life and you will lose it sooner or later anyway.

"

Look at the animals: (...) they kill without hatred. We gave birth to the light of love and unlove became the twin. We gave birth to the soul and soullessness became the twin.

"

Dirty washes, clean doesn't.

"

The desire for success and supremacy: this is where all the disasters of history come from.

"

We only feel air and freedom when there is none.

"

If a citizen steals, robs or murders, he will be deprived of his rights and locked up. The state, if it steals, robs, murders: victory belongs to it, it is admired.

"

All parents are child killers: those who come into this world have brought non-existence into existence and will die.

"

Because he who believes what he does not know is a fool. And anyone who denies something they don't know is also a fool. And I'm the third fool who stands between the two to be spat on right and left. Because God is known only by self-understanding.

"

The woman: life from head to toe. The man: a pompous victim. Woman's: all that is alive and dead, as you can grasp with both hands; the man's: all this is a lot of dubious wisdom, a big book, jumbled words.

"

I love your umbrella eyes, your soft hand that feeds you, your body snuggling next to me, I would kiss every part of you.

"

Imagination is different and imagining is different, just as speech is different and chattering is different. Imagination works according to the law of life and feeds starved desires with fog; imagination works according to the law of being, and what it creates, a work of art, an act, a thought: real and true.

"

I'm waiting for you in the southern light I'm waiting for you in the darkness of the night I'm waiting for you in the winter, in the summer I'm waiting for you on the ground, in the sky.

"

Happy are the lovers who are entwined: they receive as they give, and they give as they receive; a gift given and received cannot be distinguished here, nor a donation and loot. Wounded are wounded and wounded are wounded. In their unbridled thirst for each other, they are actually desireless: since they hold in their arms the satisfaction of those who are just as thirsty. They fight, they cry, they get angry: but their fighting is a hug, their tears are beauty, their anger is love.

"

The linden tree is all blooming, the vines are all singing, the foliage is soaking in the rays, only your heart falls asleep.

"

You stumble between a hundred laws, you rush and you are always true to yourself, you can't do anything else if you want to. Whatever you do, however you do it, you do what you think is best - what is goodness if not this?

"

He who is not yet curious: ignorant, He who is no longer curious: wise.

"

Our own death never hurts like the death of others. Oh, it's easy for you, you can endure the grave without me, but can I endure life without you?

"

The sky bleeds from your beautiful eyes, many wounds are a starry path. A lock of your hair is enough for me: I would bandage many wounds.

"

The bed of your actions: your life.

"

The past is the shape of the present; the future is the scent of the present.

"

Your life: a colorful drumming picture on the veil, you are both the main character and the viewer; the lamp lights up, the image continues, so that you wake up in the light or wake up.

"

Everything is only a tinsel image of itself, because it fades away, no memory remains; but look at the frozen ice sea of ​​the past: every movement is fixed there.

"

I wake up: I am not who I was. I fall asleep: tomorrow I will be different again. But alive, dead, on the street, in a crypt shop, I remember and I forget.

"

Be yours, if you must, the beloved luck, but let the shackles of my deeds keep me, let chance leave me in the honey or the mud, let all my shoulders carry a self-sewn destiny.

"

We all go, we all go from under the swaying trees, we all go under the humid sky across the wasteland under the dry sky, as much as we are together like this, some still look back, the moonbeam follows our footsteps, finally we all go, the sunshine is also left behind and we step into the behind the stars on the tires of heaven.

"

My friend, I have no secrets. I'm transparent like glass - that's why you can imagine that you see me?

"

Be ashamed of the many motley accepted nothings and rejoice only in the intangibles that seem to be nothing.

"

May my joy be multiplied in your joy. Let my shortcomings become goodness in you.

"

Where does soul-trembling come from? From so far away, where there are no stars, and the thought cannot reach.

"

How many bytes of mercy? crime? What do I know who; and comes back to pick it up. My female body and my male soul were opposites: On the outside, sweet, soft smoothness, but on the outside, heavy ore straining in rock convulsions, Giant workshop, sweat-soaking Thirsty eternal fire.

"

Soon-gray-birth: Single birth, Child birth, Clean house fire, Milk smell, poo stench, I will not be a Milking cow, Mourning my free Wandering.

"

You took my beautiful lover to the shore of a stream, Envious of me, you took him off your feet, You put his big turnip in your soup, And you are angry with me, who did this against me. I should be crying, so don't you be sad, That you became a two-headed animal with him, You sacrificed a little blood for your kindness, I think he understood, you had a lot of fun.

"

Do not desire what is commonly called fame and glory: because famous people are in a shop window like a pile of cakes and curiosity overwhelms and defiles them like a cloud of flies; fame is not glory, but misery and humiliation.

"

Do not hope for your glory and immortality from your fellow men, because it is in you, or you do not have it.

"

You are God's guest in this world! why don't you let the host open all his rooms one by one, show all his treasures in turn?

"

Happiness is a roadside garbage, you can take enough, whoever reaches out, the ripening pain must be deserved.

"

I'm not hiding though - I'm just not really. I act and suffer like the others, but my innermost quality is non-existence itself.

"

If someone fails to act, the other person is invisibly there to do it.

"

I speak to you from the shadows of torment, God. Don't let me lose my mind in blind danger, in a chained abyss.

"

I pity today's man because his heart cannot grow old.

"

For me, friendship is not manifested in confessions and encouragements, but only in the silence of confidentiality.

"

Time does not protect the treasure - no: it chews it apart like a child chews a toy. Treasures live differently, they are invisible: they are nailed to the inner temple of the soul, like a thousand pillars, ram's horns and rim. The immortal work is timeless.

"

It's really nice! more beautiful than any fairy tale, it's a shame that she is an unfaithful lover of all of us.

"

A good poem is a living being, like an apple, when I look at it, it looks back glistening, it says one thing to the hungry and the full, and another to the tree, the bowl and the mouth, it doesn't even have a final content or form, it just lives and gives life.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Don't expect a miracle. Because the promise of a miracle is fulfilled without a miracle.
If you want to penetrate into the world of the larger-than-life, larger-than-self, or into your real being (here "I" and "other" cannot be separated): be careful not to get involved in illusions, "miracles" instead of reality. Frequent prayer, frequent introspection, is the protection against this. Nowhere are vigilance and sobriety so necessary as here, where the standards of life are not applicable.
If you want to know your timeless base-layer, you must first grapple with your layered over temporal person, which hides the base from you. Dismantle your person and see it as a stranger. Let nothing remain hidden, unexamined, unconscious. Let nothing remain in it that you cling to or hate, because both clinging and hating are falsifying.
The simplest way of self-examination is prayer. If in prayer you confess your faults to God, you will have penetrated every nook and cranny of your person, because man, in prayer, is honest before God; he is always lying to himself, but he dares not lie to God. And if you have asked God's help, you bring into operation the help that is unknown under your person.

"

If you strive to follow the eternal standard, do not be offended at those who do not strive to do so, unless their efforts are fluctuating between many finite and changing standards. Look not at what they have not, but at what they have: for even the most miserable have spiritual treasures which you lack. Anyone can make excuses, anyone can be superior; learn to learn from everyone.

"

"Give back the unit of measure to man". Introduce in prayers.

[Translation not available in English]

"

He who begins to dismantle his individuality loses more and more the boundary between his own soul and the souls of others. When he looks into the eyes of his fellow man, he senses his feelings and recognises: 'this is me'; when he strokes a dog, he senses its world merging into one: 'this is me'; when he touches a piece of furniture for a long time, he takes in its indivisible silence: 'this is me'. His own soul is no longer his own, and the soul of everything is his own; everything is transparent, as if it were made of crystal; at once immensely rich, his body and soul are refreshed and filled with the same joy of work, rest, company, solitude.

"

Dismantle your character and the world will come into you.
Dissolve the world that has become your character and wholeness will come into you.

"

If you arrange the contents of your inner being; if you separate within yourself the changing transitory elements of your person and the unchanging, eternal world of your being: the transitory elements appear to you as objects, plants, animals, so to speak, and you can interact with the factors of the eternal world. Suddenly you notice in your solitude that you are learning from someone without the use of mouth or ears; and at first you do not know whether you are imagining it or whether a disembodied being has descended to you. Your invisible teacher is not a mirage, nor a spirit descended to you, but one of the infinite currents that lie beneath your person. The infinite currents are the formers and guides of the personality, which can be accessed and interrogated after the personality has been broken through. Anyone can be in touch with them, only not everyone knows it; intuition, the sudden realization without precedent, is always a suggestion of one of the infinite currents.
The infinite currents behind the personality are called angels by Christians, gods by the ancient Greeks, and devas by the Indians. Who are these angels, gods, and devas? They are not persons; they are the soul-powers pervading the universe; they are not spirits outside our own being and descending to us, nor are they parts of our own being, but they are the forces of the naked soul emerging from under the cloak of personality; the soul which is not 'my soul' or a 'separate soul', but the 'soul', without limit.
The individuality-obsessed man of today has lost the knowledge of angels; he does not believe in invisible winged creatures descending from the air, and he is right. But he does not know that his personality and his soul are not identical; that behind his temporal personality lies the non-temporal soul, which is not one's soul, but is undivided, boundless; and that the various manifestations of the soul are angels; they are hidden in him like a multitude of colors in a colorless sunbeam. And he who penetrates beneath his transitory person, comes into contact with the angels, as a prisoner who breaks the prison window comes into contact with the pure air.
There are other kinds of angels: an angel of a landscape, an angel of a family, an angel of a nation and many more. And there are devils. An angel or devil is not a person, but it is not a symbol. If you notice in any of your manifestations that which is not temporal, not enclosed, not your own: it is the angel or the devil.
A general human frailty: greed, frivolity, avarice, etc., is as unenclosed and unindividual as the soul. From profligate to profligate, from miser to miser, an invisible current runs, not in space, yet almost palpable: this current is the devil.
Between angel and devil there is no more sharp boundary than between good and bad man. The infinite currents behind your personality, if you access them, behave like angels; if you pile the dross of life on top of them, they behave like devils.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Angels and devils of the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms: fairies, elves. They are not beings; they are not in time, but in the unchanging.
Observe a group of sparrows soaring above: what in their wing-noise is not the sound of nature, but some sweet simplicity: this is the fairy of the sparrow-flock. Or observe a walnut-tree: if you pluck it, it bears its fruit reluctantly and grudgingly; and if you approach it gently and respectfully, it will willingly give, and you will see on the lower branches, which seem to be stripped, the most available and hitherto unnoticed nuts: this is the fairy of the walnut-tree.

[Translation not available in English]

"

The model of total-time in phenomenon-time: the idea-time. A person's life in idea-time does not begin with birth and does not end with death. Your vague, irresponsible acts in idea-time are always 'youthful', and your mature, responsible moments are 'old age', whether they occur at the age of twenty or seventy.
In ideal-time, the life of the one-man is always moving from the weaker to the different, and the life of humanity from the different to the weaker. For only the one-man always rises above the state of life; mankind as a whole is a formless mass that darkens.
The four main epochs of humanity in the time of ideas:
First, the Golden Age. The first Age of Man. The life of man is silent-virtuous, simple, mystery-less, in perfect harmony with disembodied forces and nature.
Second is the Silver Age. The unchanging base-layer and the changing personality are separated in man. Eternity radiates into the ephemeral in three ways: as being, as unqualified validity, as truth; as goodness drawing the temporal towards the timeless; and as the formal factor of the former two, as beauty. Human life is characterised by the proliferation of faculties, by the achievement of greatness without great difficulty. Heavenly help multiplies man's strength, and man does not always use his strength in the service of the one from whom he has received it. The rebellious man of the Silver Age is so powerful that disembodied forces can defeat him only in severe, alternate struggles.
Third is Ore Age. In human beings, the link between the unchanging and the changing is loosened, in need of constant reinforcement. Truth, goodness, beauty are no longer self-evident, but must be sought. The search for truth is science, goodness is law, beauty is art. The man of the Age of Ore is tenacious, hard-working, courageous, passionate, unyielding, vindictive; his stubborn diligence usually brings results. If he rebels, he has little strength to be a menace, but he is so tenacious that disembodied forces can only drain him with a torrent of fire and water.
Fourth is the Iron Age. In man there is no longer any connection between the unchanging and the changing, except in glimpses, in dreams. They know only the variable and lose their sense of the unchanging. They live entirely in a disjointed phenomenal world of space and time, and what is unbroken, transcendent of space and time: God, eternity, incorporeal forces, are all imagined separately in space and time, in the manner of phenomena in motion: thus human primordial knowledge becomes a confused fable. Some see the absurdity of this fable, and therefore deny God and the immortality of the soul and the afterlife; others, out of cowardice, want at all costs to believe in the impossible fable. The tragedy of the Iron Age is that the Iron Age man is a fool if he is an unbeliever and a greater fool if he is a believer. The good will to strive for truth, goodness and beauty is mostly there, but it is as hopeless as the flight of a bird without wings. Truth is replaced by a hundred different views, science by data-crunching and popularising mass-cultivation. Goodness has been replaced by sentimentality, which, while in one place it is moved to tears and dispenses sugar and honey, in another it is hateful and mercilessly strips. The law is replaced by all sorts of decrees which have nothing to do with morality, they are dictated by the interests of the ruling party; if the ruling party changes, what a day before you were in prison for, now you are placed by the meat pot for the same thing, and what a day before you were decorated, now you are hanged for the same thing. In the Iron Age, there are only guards and prisoners, and every time there is a change of regime, these two castes are exchanged. Beauty is replaced by desirability, art by entertainment and home decoration. The man of the Iron Age is as violent as he is helpless; he organizes, arranges, controls everything, but it becomes a mess; everything he tries to build is a pothole. He never turns against the higher power, for he does not know it; he does not need a flood to destroy it: if he lives up to his potential, he is ruined.
These four epochs exist in idea-time, not in historical time; but every stage of historical time bears the stamp of one of these four epochs.
Examine whether you yourself belong to the Golden, Silver, Ore or Iron Age?

"

You experience the change of days and seasons: this is the external time, measured by the steady movement of the clock.
You experience the change of the disembodied contents of your person: this is the inner time, for which you have no measuring instrument, passing quickly or slowly compared to the outer time.
Inner time is also played out in the animal, the plant, the mineral, as their changing phenomena are cast like shadow-lace upon unchanging existence.
The succession of inanimate forces at work: world-flow-time.
The ebb and flow of the universal current of humanity: historical time.
These are all phenomenon-times, but they are formed by a series of changing and finite phenomena. Of a different nature is total-time, which contains the unchanging, infinite divine operation. World-creation, world-process and world-end are contained in total-time; in phenomena-time the end will never come, just as creation never occurred in it, and just as existence does not fit into it, but only its innumerable arising and passing manifestations. In every minute of the phenomena-time, creation, continuation, destruction are equally present as a finite mimesis of the infinite creation, existence, judgment; but creation, survival, judgment is not there. Phenomenon-time is not infinite, nor does it have a beginning and an end, like the circle. In total-time, creation is the beginning, survival is the middle, and judgment is the end, and they coincide just as the plus and minus infinities coincide in the point, and the infinite distance between them. Total-time, what all unchanging-endless, is point-like; and the myriad kinds of phenomena-time are encircled as nearer or farther circles.

[Translation not available in English]

"

There are no two worlds, only one, showing to our external perception the changing series of symptoms, to our internal cognition the constant essence.
In the temporal and changing, it is perception that adjusts us; in the timeless and unchanging, it is imagination.
He who immerses himself in the basic layer of himself, the unchanging: no matter how many times he repeats it, no matter how much he knows the unchanging, he still has no perception of it. What he knows there: he does not experience, but imagines; only the unchanging leads the imagination just as the changing series of symptoms leads the perception.
Sensory experience is possible only of the variable, solid knowledge only of the constant. There is no sensory experience of the essence, only knowledge based on inner cognition; there is no solid knowledge of the phenomena, only temporary knowledge.
If the variable "is", the constant is only an idea; if the constant "is", the variable is only a ghost. "There is eternity" and "there is no eternity", "God is" and "God is not", are equally valid, whether viewed from the constant or from the variable.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

What is articulated is perceived by the soul between the boundaries; and what is unarticulated is an idea. To the boundless soul, that which is undivided is perceptible; and that which is divided is a phenomenon. To the complete soul, stumpiness is that which is dissected or unsectioned; reality is that which is beyond naming.

"

Table and non-table, long and short, good and bad, eternal and ephemeral - The double Names are perfect guides to man. And he who sees beyond them: glimpses the Unnamable.
Just as day and night are halved around the globe, so are the namable dualities halved around the unnamable soul. In sleep, death and contemplation, there is no day and night, and where separation ceases, there also cease the namable dualities.

[Translation not available in English]

"

"I am the variable and I am the unchangeable."
For those who don't know: creation can justly be called cruel.

"

The agony of change is the inhalation of unchanging. The joy of change is the exhalation of unchanging.

"

Calmness is incessantly achieved in the struggle. Reality sings unceasingly through appearances. Song rests incessantly in the unchanging.

"

Not a single point fits in the space. Space seems limitless only to the senses; in fact, it is narrower than a point.
That which is boundless is without coverage; that which is without coverage has the same infinite greatness and infinite smallness.
God is not only infinitely great, but also infinitely small: there is no smallness in which he is not fully contained.
God and the universe are within a single point.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

In the phenomenal, God is only an idea; in God, the phenomenal is only a ghost.
God is not present in the perceptibility of things. Things turn their backs to perception and their colours to God. God is present in the common essence of things, but is not present in the many perceptible manifestations of things, where a host of phenomena ripple.

"

Whoever reaches out to the infinite currents behind his person will gradually notice that his bodily senses are being peculiarly enriched. Whomever you pay close attention to with your eyes, ears, or in any other way, his form and present state are almost reflected in you, and also that of the phenomena that are passing or persisting. When you speak to someone, you perceive not only their words, but what emanates from their being; and they think you are a mind-reader. And all that is reflected in you in this way is as if it were colour; not only does your eye see colour, but an inner, hidden eye does too.
The souls of inanimate objects are dark purple, of plants green, of animals dark yellow, brown, reddish. The dullness is brown, the spiritual richness is the play of grey in bright light colours. The colour of agile souls is paler, more articulated, more variable; that of ponderous souls is darker, more uniform, more constant. The basic colour of a child's soul is like a luminous pearl; that of a man is a cold greyish-blue, which is mostly darkened, faded, browned, reddened; that of a woman is purplish-red, and this is mostly inclined very early to the colour of a withered petal. The few men who grow old in such a way that their old age is a noble withering, not a forced fading: all the colour of ore, silver, bronze, gold.
The spiritual sense of colour is in fact there for everyone, but not everyone takes care of it and not everyone develops it in themselves. One can feel flaring anger as red, helpless anger as poison green and bright lemon yellow, daydreaming as purple and pink, broad cheerfulness as red, quiet cheerfulness as metallic light, boredom as pale grey, sorrow as dark blue, hopelessness as black.

"

It's better to live on a mountain than in a valley. But how rich the valley is, my soul, how rich.
Once I was watching a young chariot, not with my eyes, but with my ears, for there was a wall of boards between us. I had known him long ago: a lad of sixteen, simple-minded, full of a corn-colour glow of the senses, which filled him with a sort of incorruptible gaiety; what he coveted he stole, if he could, without his action being touched; the stern power no more asked him what he had taken from whence or why than it did the bird. I listened to this fowl with my ears; he wanted to talk to his elder waggoner companion, he urged him long, but he did not answer, he was asleep. Then the lad began to sing, "I drink, I always drink, my wife is angry with me..." Of course, he didn't have a drink, by all means he didn't have a wife. He had only desire, desire brings one down, wisdom says; yet desire lifted him up, for there was nothing to bring him down, for he was on the ground from the beginning. And his desire carried him not only to the drink, not only to the wife, but far beyond, when they were old married men quarreling, and the wife was roasting him for the drink.
The angel can fly no higher than this male beetle flew from one blade of grass to another.

[Translation not available in English]

"

How perfect-brilliant are all the things of life, only he who no longer desires them knows truly. A robber-murderer, when he kills his victim without mercy, is in such communion with him as never he was in bed; without knowing it, he kills not his victim, but himself; he who realizes this is not horrified, but filled with awe. Or think of the merchant, who piles up money as if the wealth he accumulates would lead somewhere, would be sufficient somewhere: he fights the impossible, a pariah confronts the universe. And that women are beautiful is known only to those who no longer desire them: as the beauty and delicacy of a bone is seen not by the dog that wishes to chew it, but by the man who does not wish to chew it.

"

A bright face looks out over the forest-covered valley. The tarn answers like a woman.

"

Everyone feeds on hell, even if they are growing towards heaven.

"

"I am a woman", radiates the flower; "I am a flower", radiates the woman. "I am a man", emanates the trunk of the creating tree; "I am the trunk of the creating tree", emanates the man.
If you want to question it: the rose disappears behind its fragrance, its colour, its form; the fruit tree opens up. If you want to enjoy it: the rose unfolds; the fruit tree disappears behind its fruit.

[Translation not available in English]

"

A single feeling obscures everything. A single sound deafens everything. A single word obscures everything. Yet: the way is through feeling, hearing, and speaking.

"

The lamp cannot see its own light. Honey does not feel its own sweetness.

"

The rainbow bridge is the only one where angels and devils come and go in such a way that you can hardly tell them apart.

"

Those who wear their names as clothes, hide their heads under their wings, retreat into their dreams.

"

Whole existence: life-less.
Whole eternity: time-less.
Whole functioning: change-less.
Power total: power-less.
Whole wisdom: thought-less.
Whole love: feeling-less.
Whole goodness: direction-less.
Complete happiness: joy-less.
Full vibration: sound-less.

"

There is something that remains unchanged.
The essence of everything is this unchanging.
If I get rid of all the eventualities: there is nothing left of me but the same.

"

Words are separate and pearl-like, things are connected and pile-like. Therefore, words and things just brush against each other.
Thought is complex and unspeakable, truth is simple and unspeakable. Truth can be known only without speech, and therefore only from yourself. Make your soul capable of knowing the truth in it.

[Translation not available in English]

"

What you read here: more than a worldview, and less than a religion.
It is more than a worldview, because it is not a way of seeing things, but a way of feeling things at their common root.
Less than a religion, because it does not speak of divine mysteries, which can only be spoken of in symbols. It has no mention of Christ, God incarnate, who dies and goes to hell for men.
What is said here is not meant to be believed, but to remind you of your true being, your true world.

Csönge, 1944-45

"

The waves are counted by those who listen in the dark, not by those who see the sea.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Whenever you can free yourself from your circumstances: the final state, in which life and death are identical, unfolds in you like a boundless radiance.
The ultimate gift: a motionless dance, a sweetness beyond taste, beyond measure.

"

The reason thinks by turning thoughts into a series of words. Whoever penetrates behind his intellect, into the world of infinite currents, here comes to a different form of thought, which may be called "angelic intellect": the spiritual contents do not appear as words, but as stationary and moving figures in an otherworldly space; here are not happy, sad, pleasant, unpleasant thoughts, but round, angular, smooth, strong, monochrome, variegated thoughts. There is an unnameable blend of sharpness and dullness, of brilliance and gloom, which covers everything, which may best be called 'music without sound'; it is the music of the angels, the music of the spheres.
And beyond the infinite currents, in the union of totality, there is another form of thought: this is the "divine intellect" in which the thinker, the object of thought, and the thought are identical.

[Translation not available in English]

"

For those who want to reach wholeness: the most stubborn obstacle that clings like a thistle: vanity. The man who consciously approaches wholeness feels excellence, superiority. And as long as he has a feeling of superiority, his individuality cannot dissolve, because only the individual can be superior or inferior, there are no differences in wholeness. The way to perfection is not the way of the excellent, but of all that are different: it is the way of all, even if they are unaware of it. And if you feel yourself to be different from those who are at the beginning of the path, and different from those who have already reached the end: you will be deceived by the delusion of time; for whether one is at the beginning, the middle, or the end of the path, is only a difference of date.

"

Don't covet what is commonly called fame and glory: for famous men stand like a heap of cakes in a shop window, and curiosity is a fly in the ointment and a cloud of filthiness; fame is not glory, but misery and humiliation. Thou shalt not covet what is commonly called eternal fame, immortality: for it shall profit you nothing if your memory remains in the memory of future generations after your death, like a shrivelled mummy in a pyramid. What the great men call immortality is not eternal life, not even eternal memory, but oblivion postponed for a few hundred or a few thousand years. Observe these slower oblivionists: how terrifying their squalid, dusty permanence. A royal silence is theirs, a golden and silver crypt-silence. Not their lives, but their deaths, stretching back centuries or decades.
Your glory and your immortality do not depend on your fellow man, for it is in you or it is not in you. The European man does not want to be so great as to fulfil the full potential of his existence, but only as a great lighthouse disappearing into the night. Do not be content with the measurable, but strive only for the whole greatness.

[Translation not available in English]

"

He who has principles or talents, feels himself excellent; he who has scraped together a heap of rubbish, or is praised, feels himself excellent. Recognize that the nightingale sings well, the dog barks well, the sheep eats the grass well, the man eats the sheep, and the grass eats the man's carcass: everything is in its place, everything dances its dance perfectly, and there is no excellence.
The harmony is complete and undisturbed. All the many separate things have independent demands that might disturb harmony: these are brought into harmony by the dance of death. Do not strive for excellence, but strive to achieve harmony within yourself, to be free from all separate demands, and then you will be free from the dance of death.
He who desires happiness is always in a rush, and his rush is in harmony. He who desires harmony is happy.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Don't tolerate in yourself the seeds of any desire to assert yourself. For as you can advance in life, so you will slide back in yourself.
Do not strive for excellence. But that does not mean neglecting your abilities. You will advance in yourself if you make your abilities as full and coherent as possible; no matter how great your abilities are, the main thing is to make the best of them and by them.
Your abilities are the steeds that will carry you to the final house; but you can only enter the house if you keep your steeds outside. Every faculty has its measure; and the final gate is only accessible to that which is immeasurable: the soul itself.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Achieving wholeness is infinitely easy and infinitely difficult. It is as easy and as difficult as saying these three words without lying and self-deception: 'I'm completely pure.' But there are, very few, simple poor people who, without striving for it and without knowing it, possess perfection. All their feelings, thoughts, intentions are pure, everything is good for them as it happens to be offered; if they have to lose property, health, family, life: they resign themselves to that without difficulty. Their life is quiet and peaceful, and their peace can be violated by no one and nothing. From their words you may not derive much, but from their being you may derive the universe itself.
These peaceful, happy people will not attain to perfection, to heaven: they are already there, there is no power that can add to them or take from them. They live on an endless high mountain, from which there is no further.

"

Man, freed from his individuality, is in common with God. The omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent.
The man freed from his individuality is not omniscient in the sense that he can tell you how much money is in a closed purse, that he knows tomorrow's newspaper today, that he can answer any question you may have with certainty. What would seem to people to be omniscience: an infinite repository of data; omniscience is not a set, but the knowledge of something simpler than 'one'.
He is not omnipotent enough to turn bread into a calabash; nor can he perhaps lift the sack which a sack-bearer easily carries. What would seem to men omnipotence: the infinite increase of success in life. He is omnipotent in such a way that, while he is going about his ordinary work, he carries in the depths of his being the action-less, complete operation of God.
It is not so omnipresent that if he is present in York, he would also be present in New York. What would appear to men as omnipresence: the full filling of space. It is omnipresent in that it reaches to the existent, to the point of no extension, which includes everything.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Modern science knows suggestion: the instrumentless, coercive influence of the human soul on the other human soul; yet it regards the power of spell, grace, prayer as superstition.
The spell, incantation; a spiritual effect to help or harm someone.
Grace, spirit-invocation, spirit-alerting; a spiritual influence exerted on a being that has escaped from life.
Prayer; tapping into the power of life-superior to life; by it we increase our own faculty many times over. A social institution, established and maintained by money, power, authority, seldom lasts a few lifetimes; and monastic orders persist, though they are created by a single praying beggar.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Stepping on and being trampled, eating and being eaten: that's life.
To wear stepping on and being trampled, eating and being gobbled up: that is existence.
To follow his whim is to wrap oneself in life. He who follows his need, wraps himself in existence.
He who loves, hates, craves, is disgusted: this is the living. He who bears the coherent calmly: this is the existent.

"

If you abstract yourself from everything you know as your being: that's actually where your being begins.
Do not confuse your body, your mind, your person with your being, with yourself. It is only your auxiliary; it is only your baggage, which is also the guardian of your needs, also a stooping burden.
Your body is not you, for it is only a substance that is constantly changing: at the age of forty, there is not a single part of your twenty-year-old body. But neither are you your emotions and your intellect, for you were not yet, when you looked at them from the cradle. Who art you? the boundless that appeared between the boundaries at your conception.
If you consider your bounded person as yourself, do a Copernican inversion: consider the boundless totality as yourself, and your person as a temporary bound, a mere apparition, a "not-self".
Where sensation, impassivity, thought, thoughtlessness, change, immutability cease; where you would think there is nothing: there your very being begins.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

One by one, examine all the contents of your personality and sort them out. Look at your habits: where they come from, what they do, where they are going.
Dissect your individuality and all its contents will appear to you as alien.
Dismantle your individuality and do not fear to be impoverished: for it will be replaced by the richness of boundless coherence.
Dissolve your individuality and fear not to lose anything: for if you expel the unwashed, you will find it washed in its place.
Dissolve your individuality and the infinite currents of your soul, which are not within you and not without you, will be set free, pervading everything.
He who is ruled by his individuality: if he gets ahead, he becomes a boor; if he falls behind, he becomes a rag. And he who is mastering his individuality: in reality he is unaffected by fortune and misfortune.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

The purgatory: the battle of heaven and hell, full of changing shapes, full of fleeting features. Heaven and hell are final, undivided, unseparated: one is infinite fullness, beyond "much", beyond all richness; the other is infinite lack, beyond "little", beyond all misery.

There are no differences in heaven and hell, everything in them is the same; yet we can speak of the circles and sub-circles, the divisions, of heaven and hell: for different for every saved and for every damned person is the stairway which connects him with the phenomenal world; for each stairway is formed according to the way in which its owner functions in the phenomenal world. He who is saved or damned is no longer an individual, no longer a separate being; but his staircase is just as individual as he is an individual in his relation to the phenomenal world. No two staircases are the same, but there are group similarities: they are the sections of heaven and hell.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

If, breaking through your fleeting individuality, you penetrate deep within yourself into the eternal soul: you conquer wholeness like a general conquering a castle.
There are easier paths to wholeness. Not only by breaking through all temporalities and pushing into the impermanent you can be united with God. Through prayer and sacrifice, you can enrich your feelings in such a way that they reach God. Church-walking, ritual, devotion, supplication, penance, chastity, if done with a whole heart and not seeking to beg earthly goods from heavenly power, all lead to God: by them God bends to you, you feel his kiss, and you become more and more one with him.

[Translation not available in English]

"

Heaven, hell, purgatory are not just post-death states: everyone, dead or alive, wears one or the other.
All that is peculiarly finite, distinctive: it suffers in purgatory. Pleasures grow only in purgatory; and because all pleasures are finite and the lack of pleasure around them is infinite: therefore purgatory is torment.
In hell there is neither torment nor pleasure. He who is so dulled by his passions that he enjoys nothing more than to drink a great deal of water, and can only agonize as a machine creaks, has reached hell in his life.
In heaven there is neither pleasure nor torment. He who has no more need of pleasure can be stirred up by nothing, his whole being is opened like a blessing: he has reached heaven in his life.
The world of space and time is a purging fire; rare is the man who reaches heaven or hell in his lifetime. Your individuality is nothing but the sum of your finite needs; therefore only by losing your individuality can you reach the infinite state: heaven or hell.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

I was travelling on a train, third class. A nun boarded with a lot of luggage: things for a new children's shelter.
He was not wearing anything remarkable to the eye, but his being was radiant: he was no longer affected by life on earth, which did not prevent him from being more active than those who want a hundred things from life.
I addressed her. Have you got all your luggage? She thought about it and started counting: "One, two, three... eight, nine" and then pointed to herself: "ten". For her, her own body was just luggage. This simple-minded, helpless, absent-minded little servant is more powerful than all the weapons on earth put together.

"

As soon as you no longer have a need for pleasure: you learn the way of uninterrupted pleasure and you don't use it.
As soon as you live no matter how long: you will know the way of eternal life on earth and you will not live it.
As soon as you realize that mankind does not need to be made happy, peaceful, wise: you will know the way of it and you will not make use of it.
All that seems most desirable: is the most powerful poison. It would make the world go to hell.
"As soon as you don't need it: everything is yours" - that's the sign of the marketplace of life.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

The unchanging existence neither desires nor hates the changing life, but embraces it like a nest embraces the baby birds perched within, without feeling and yet with infinite love.
Likewise, he who has put his root from life into being; he does not rejoice in the evolving, nor lament the lost; he wishes to help no one; he loves all things alike, without feeling and infinitely.
He praises without admiration and reproves without disgust, for all things in life are ultimately neither good nor bad; nothing is better than anything, only the journey has different stages.

[Translation not available in English]

"

If you have separately recognized your unchanging base layer: your timeless, infinite being, in which lies the eternal measure; and its temporal, finite garment: your multiform individuality, in which lie the occasional needs: you are enabled to be guided by your eternal being, not by your ever-changing individuality.
Then you can recognize the true role of your individuality: it is only a signpost to guide you through the world of phenomena. Desires will no longer be violent, but will be like signs on a map: it is up to your discretion how you adapt to them, they are not demanding. Bodily suffering no longer affects you: your body writhes and wails in agony, your being watches and cares for it like a strange, sick animal. Hunger and thirst no longer affect you, nor sensuality, nor joy and sorrow, nor desire for knowledge: you perceive and repair the defects of your body, your feelings, your intellect, as strangely as you would a wrinkle, a stain, a tear in your garment. All that seems desirable in life: wealth, success, power, health, are no more to you than the playthings of childhood to the adult; it is not your appetite but your situation that determines what you wear. Your eternal being does not desire anything, not even salvation: it desires only as steam desires to rise and as a stone desires to fall: not according to its personal desire, but according to the law of its position.
If you have taken the light of your existence out of your individuality and placed it in your eternal being: you have become inviolable, you have taken your destiny into your own hands. You can no longer be harmed or benefited, you function without reward, as the river rolls sand, gives life to fish, carries boat.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Renounce nothing: for he that hath renounced is withered in that. But do not be a slave to your desires.
To cling to repressed passions is as bitter as to crumble among unleashed passions.
If you indulge your desires, they will mate and mate again. If you kill your desires, they come back as ghosts. If you tame your desires: you can ensnare them and plough and sow with dragons, like perfect power itself.
Most men, if they happen to catch sight of some monster of their own abyss, push it back into the gloom with horror; henceforth the monster is more-anxious and slowly cracks the wall. If you see one or other of your monsters, do not abhor it, nor be frightened, nor lie to yourself, but rather be glad that you have recognised it; take care of it, for it is easily tamed and becomes a good pet.
You have basically no good or bad qualities. Your well-groomed qualities are good; your cherished or neglected qualities are bad.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Think of life as the giant snake. If you keep it at a distance, you can admire its dancing curves and the rhythmic pattern of its skin, and you can care for it and feed it. If you keep it to yourself, it will coil upon you and you will no longer delight in it, and not you will feed it, but your flesh and blood.
Do not keep life from you by hiding from it, for it will creep after you unnoticed, or unexpectedly crush your hiding place. There is no escaping it, not even into death.
Keep life so at a distance from you that you may have dominion over it: as the serpent is dominated by the snake charmer with his whistle music.
The music that makes the serpent of life tame and obey, emanates from the naked, boundless soul, stripped of finite needs.
Neither in idleness of hermitage nor in activity you can't conquer life; only in yourself, if you arrange your feeble qualities to conform to the perfect measure.
If you achieve this: your idleness is as active as the sunshine; your activity is as idle as the change of the weather.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

"I thank Béla Hamvas, my master, for allowing me to write this book: he created harmony in me.

This book is for you to know the harmony of the soul and, if it is any business of yours, to take possession of it.

What follows is neither new nor old: it bears the markings of an age, but its essence is not originated and not transient. He who walks beside the spring always picks his bouquet from the same flowers."

Towards wholeness

"Solvere volo et solvi volo.

Salvare volo et salvari volo.

Generare volo et generari volo.

Cantare volo et cantari volo.

Saltate cuncti!

Ornare volo et ornari volo.

Lucerna sum tibi, ille qui me vides.

Janua sum tibi, quicunque me pulsas.

Qui vides quod ago, tace opera mea.

(I want to dissolve and I want to dissolved.

I long to redeem and I long to be redeemed.

I desire to conceive and I desire to be conceived.

I long to sing and I long to become a melody.

Dance, all of you!

I long to adorn and I long to be adorned.

I am your lamp when you see me.

I am your door when you knock on me.

Who sees what I do, hear my work.)

From an apocryphal Gospel of John"

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

The journey into yourself: the journey into the universe. The spatial world is to the universe as a pocket of cloth is to the living body.
At night, under the starry sky, you cry out: how big the world is! But behold: a single thought of yours can pass the farthest sky in an instant.
The journey from one thought to another is infinitely longer than from star to star.
One feels space to be infinite, but in reality one is confined in space as in a prison cell, the length and width of which are not one full step. He who has reached to the infinite currents of his being has made a small gap in the wall of the chamber; he who has dissolved his personality has made a gap in the wall of the chamber so wide that he can reach out.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Look at a rock, a hammer, a bush, a horse, a man: all created, decaying, bounded, individual, separate-existing. Existence is the same in all.
The many forms that arise and decay: that is life.
The eternal succession, of which each form is only a stage: this is existence.
Man is the only one who seeks in the variables what can be fixed by name: he has meaning.
Man is the only one who digs beneath the individual and conditional in himself, to the common and unconditional existence: he has a soul.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Full wisdom is for the stone and the naked soul. The knowledge of nothing is the same as the knowledge of everything.
Go to the light, but ask it nothing. He who has no need to ask, is common with the answer.
As soon as you are smarter than anyone: you are dumber than everyone. To be wiser, this can rightly be done only by the master, who is aware of the stupidity of his "wiser" and on whose part teaching is humility: the wise listener is subordinated to the fool who speaks.
Truth, once spoken, is no longer truth; at best it is a feeble approximation of truth. The wise man is wise only as long as he remains silent; as soon as he speaks, he is a fool, for he can only give the indigestible husk of his nourishing knowledge. "Whatever fits into this miserable shell: look for it, eat it" - that's all he can do.
If you want to possess the truth, you can only use the teachings as a help, you have to find it deep within yourself.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

The only real learning is to awaken to life the dormant ancient knowledge in our being.
The primal wisdom inherent in the human being is essentially the same in everyone, its validity is complete. Ancestral knowledge is the only suitable foundation; that which is based on it is incorruptible, that which is based on thought is decayable.
Ancestral knowledge is infinitely simple, so simple that it cannot be put into words. It is agreed with all that is necessary, calm, solid; it is opposed to all that is seductive, exciting, teeming.
Ten armies, a hundred coffers, a thousand deeds are destroyed; what the possessors of the primal study create without any help is preserved.
He who has conquered for himself the ancestral knowledge inherent in his being has attained all that is humanly attainable; life and death can only superficially wound him, he is essentially inviolable and complete.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Spread your treasures - let yourself become wealth.
Spread your ornaments - let yourself become beauty.
Forget your entertainments - let yourself become merriment.
Burn your books - let yourself become wisdom.
Waste your muscles - let yourself become strength.
Extinguish your flames - let yourself become love.
Banish your pity - let yourself become goodness.
Shed your beliefs - let yourself become faith.
Break through your barriers - let yourself become the world.
Unite your life and death - let wholeness become you yourself.

"

May my joy be multiplied in your joy.
May my imperfection become goodness in you.

There is only one command, the rest is advice: try to feel, think, act in such a way that you will be for the good of all.
There is only one knowledge, the rest is only addition: the earth beneath you, the sky above you, the ladder is within you.

The truth is not in sentences, but in undistorted existence.
Eternity is not in time, but in the state of harmony.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

The Earth is the purgatory of lies; here everything around us is a lie: the fake-ness of space, the fake-ness of things, the fake-ness of ourselves. And in the human brain even truth dances: at once everything is true, and at once nothing is true. The only way out of the flood of lies is precisely the one that seems to be the most truthful: imagination. In the midst of all this fake reality, it is up to your imagination to restore the true reality.
It is not the mountain and not the valley that is real, but the beauty which your imagination enjoys in the forms of the mountains and valleys; and from the pseudo-endlessness of the phenomenal world, the way leads through your imagination to the true infinity within you.
Imagination is one thing and fancy another, as speech is another and chatter another. Imagination works according to the law of life and feeds the hungry desires with mist; imagination works according to the law of being and what it creates, work of art, deed, thought: real and true.
On earth, all that comes into being and passes away is called reality; only imagination seems to draw its creatures out of nothing. The pseudo-nothing from which imagination draws is reality; and in the many separate pseudo-realities that exist, only what in them seems to be nothing, imagination, is real: their imperceptible, common essence, the unchanging existence behind their changing manifestations.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Public discourse does not distinguish between good and pleasant: God is good, scratching an itch is good. Most people think of heaven as pleasure, and hell as torment.
Pleasure, pain and all dissection, even the purest, belong to the flesh. Happiness is only accompanied by joy in the body, unhappiness is only accompanied by pain in the body. With death, joy, anguish and all dismemberment pass away.
To the sentimentalist, the boundless is like frost; to the hoarder, like plunder; to the individual, like annihilation.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Break down the stones of your face within you: your rocky summit lights you up! Flesh and blood are false and greedy, but true and gentle is the skeleton.
If you cherish your individuality in the depths of your being: as if you wore the garment in your belly and warm it with your chilling naked body.
If you hope for happiness in the changing, not in the unchanging, if you hope for eternity in the changing, not in the unchanging: as if you wanted to feed and clothe your mirror image, so this will keep skinny and naked your body and your reflection.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

There are two ways in which man can be relieved of his individuality: he can either sink below it or rise above it.
There are men who are so absorbed in the shapelessness of the mass-soul, or in the undercurrent of some debauchery of the intellect, that they are completely dissolved in it, are blunted, and their separateness is only an appearance. And their death is only the death of this appearance: with the dissolution of their bodies, the last sign of their separateness disappears, they are finally merged in the dark, sticky currents. This is damnation.
And there are some who, rising above their individuality, make impersonal, eternal measure their true being; in death, they crumble down their separateness like a prison wall and flow from their temporal, closed life into timeless, boundless wholeness. This is salvation.
Most people retain their individuality until death. His plans, his circumstances, his little pleasures are the meaning of life to him, and he shrinks from the timeless infinity, the salvation, which is revealed in the moments of his dying, as much as from the vague attraction, the damnation, which rises from under the fading consciousness; in none of these is there feeling, sense, change, articulation, which are necessary to his pleasures; his disintegrating instinct clings to the final wreck of life, and this no longer offers him shelter.
Life, change, time slips away from him, he is terrified of unchanging eternity: he is in a frozen state, lacking both the fragmentation of life and the fullness of being. His fate after death depends in a small measure on how he is remembered, whether he is prayed for, whether he is helped by earthly and non-earthly good intentions; and above all on whether there was in his life a general virtue, above the individual, which belongs not to the personality but to the eternal measure of the character, which does not perish with the destruction of the personality and which sustains him. This is the purifying fire.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Descend into the depths of yourself as into a well; and as at the bottom of the bounded well you will find boundless groundwater: beneath your changing individuality you will find unchanging existence.
Most people believe that at death they will be annihilated, or will live on disembodied in space and time. Death is not an annihilation, nor is it a continuation of life; with death all that is the temporal, changing part of man is dissolved: the body, the feeling, the intellect, the whole personality; and the basic layer remains naked, in which there is no possibility of change, of creation, of destruction.
It is not man's being, but his separate being, that ceases. Today man can hardly distinguish between the cessation of his being and the cessation of his separate being: he can only imagine his being without his separateness, without his body, his feelings, his consciousness, his temporality, his changeability, as a state of fainting, of deep sleep. But the transition from separate existence to impersonal, real existence is not a diminution, or even an infinite intensification; it is not a deep sleep, but rather a fullness of wakefulness, compared to which even the most awake state of life is only a dazzling hesitation.
The one who descends into his own basic layer leaves behind all feelings of life, all thoughts and possibilities, and is where he will be after death, in the timeless, unchanging, where there is no more "I" and "not-I", but the identity of everything with everything, an indivisible infinity. It is not a swooning darkness, but a luminous radiance, a radiant action without action, a total love without feeling; an eternal changelessness, yet not a frozen state, but a supernaturalness of change, in which all variables are included, like the possibility of sleep in wakefulness.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Is there a God? In that which is independent of space, time and all illusions: the Is and the Is Not are the same.
Do I have eternity? Beyond space, time and all illusions: being and non-being are the same.
All your knowledge is only good to guide you through the variables, but it offers no certainty of the unchanging. There is knowledge only in the variable and only about the variable, for in it are separately ascertainable the Is and the Is Not, right and wrong, convex and concave; but in the totality all these are indivisibly identical, and therefore there is nothing in it to be named. Totality is not one and not more, not I and not other, not something and not nothing.
If you want to know the totality, ask no questions, for all 'yes' and 'no' referring to it mean the same thing; but dive into yourself, beneath yourself, and where there is nothing more, where everything is identical with everything else: this is the totality.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

The man you see coming and going: closed, individual; yet the deepest layer of the human being is not closed, not individual, is interconnected with everything, is identical with the single existence lying at the bottom of all forms.
The timeless infinity unfolding from behind the finite personality in time: the soul. The timeless infinity that does not need to unfold: the God.
Separate boundaries exist only in space and time; that which is spaceless, timeless: it is unbroken. The human soul emerging from the shell of personality is identical with God, as silence is with silence, but as the cessation of noise is with silence.
Man, when freed from his enclosure, sees God in three ways: as a being beyond the "is", without reference; as love enveloping and radiating the universe; and as an infinite soul shining forth after the disintegration of finite personality.
For the God-immersed man, there is no longer anything desirable or undesirable, no longer any degree; everything is infinite and desireless love. For him all is the same: all is the Absolute Unchanging, from which flows the myriad changing phenomena. God contains all, and the liberated soul contains all in God.

[Translation not available in English]

"

Don't suppress your bad habits, but polish them. Whatever harmful, sick, malignant tendencies you find: remember that anything can only have a bad condition, not a bad nature.
Reject nothing from the outside world; do not hate, abhor, or be disgusted. If you dislike something, it is a sign that you do not know it well enough. All that is filth in the world is filth only in relation to you and not in itself; withdraw from it and it is no longer filth, but a neutral phenomenon.
When you have eaten soup from a plate, you say to the empty plate that remains, 'Dirty;' but there is nothing on it but the residue of the soup which you have just eaten as clean. The dung in the middle of the room is filth, in the field of grain it is a life-giving force. So it is with everything that appears clean or filthy; nothing is good or bad in itself, but only according to its position.
That which is clean in its relation to you, receive; that which is unclean in its relation to you, do not touch; but love equally that which belongs to you and that which is untouchable. Do not hate, do not abhor, do not be disgusted. If you dislike something, it is a sign both of your lack of understanding and of the fact that the object of your dislike is in some way present in you. Do you hate the rich? purge your desire for wealth and you will not hate. Hate womanizers? purge your sensual desire and you will not hate. In such a case, you must not stigmatize or try to correct the object of your dislike, but find its counterpart within yourself and refine it until the dislike is dissipated.
You should only try to correct the faults of others if you can see them clearly, without being repugnant to yourself; and if you are sure that your intervention is not an intrusion or a hopeless attempt.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

The individual man abhors old age: he regards it as a debilitation, a helplessness, an undeserved humiliation. The true man does not abhor old age, for in it he can attain his undisturbed unfolding; his years are steps, higher and higher.
If you fear not sickness, misery, old age, death, any calamity: for you, old age will be a more and more certain fulfilment, poverty a burdenless freedom, any misery an increase, and you will know death before you die.

[Translation not available in English]

"

The natural need of childhood: freedom. And today's child is caged by constraints.
The natural need of adulthood: life. And today's adult either barely lives, or lives at the expense of himself and others, on hidden paths.
The natural need of old age: rest. And today's old man, as if his earlier needs could not be satisfied, wants freedom and life even at the edge of the grave.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Would you swap fates with someone?
Do you want to be rich? You would trade your wealth with a billionaire, but not your destiny. Would you like to be a people pleaser? With the king or the people's leader you would trade your power, but not your destiny. Would you like to be a saint? With a saint you would exchange your state of development, but not your destiny.
Each man can bear only his own fate; he would collapse under the fate of another.
Fate gives to each one the food that is alone suited to him; but he who cannot like all flavours alike, gnaws one food with satisfaction, and is nauseated by another; and digests one food with difficulty because he is greedy to gobble it, and another because he would spit it out.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

A moving object can be injured, movement is inviolable; the things of life can be injured, life is inviolable. Recognize separately in yourself that which is moving and is the thing of life: all that is your temporary part; and that which is movement and is life itself: all that is your final whole.

"

Virtue is that which conforms to the eternal standard and lifts us up to perfection; sin is that which opposes the eternal standard and moves us away from perfection.
He who attains to perfection is identified with the eternal measure: he has no virtue and no more sin; just as the nature of fire is not virtue but light, so the nature of a being identified with perfection is not virtue but action according to the eternal measure. In wholeness there is no good and evil, no merit and fault, no reward and punishment.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Be strict with yourself, but don't torture your nature. Put down your whims, your desires, not that you may be miserable without them, but that you may flow like water and be as sure as the sky.
The rule is not to imprison yourself in it; let it be your dwelling, free to go in and out as you please.
A rule is no good if you wear it with determination, if it rattles on you gloomily and stubbornly; a rule is good if it is absorbed in your feelings and supports you gently and pliantly.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Morality, which you wear compulsively and unkindly: it is not virtue, but weakness.
Virtue is always prominent. There is no sin that is not nearer to virtue than a multitude of shrinking pseudo-virtues.
If you have virtue, the test of it is that you feel not the yoke of your virtue, but its splendor, its lusciousness, its power.
If you're virtuous, the test of it is that you love virtue and sin alike, and without covetousness.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

It is in vain to avoid sin, if you leave the false virtue to yourself. The more virtue and sin are developed, the broader they are; the more pseudo-virtue is developed, the more convulsive it is. Virtue can always be made of sin, but out of pseudo-virtue it is difficult.
All pseudo-virtues prey on some real virtue, with which they are mistaken. Religious virtue is the impatient denominationalism and pious piety, patriotism is violent chauvinism, philanthropy is the self-important public zeal, science is the pseudo-scientific tunnel vision, art is the social urgency of art-artistic patronage, of everyday diligence, the mud-slinging toil; of goodness, the dripping-hearted charity and intrusive consolation; of loving honesty, the spouse-fishing greed and rummaging in other people's dirty laundry, etc.
Virtue is never violent; by contrast, the motto of any pseudo-virtue might be, "What I do not do, no one else may do."
The pseudo-virtues strangle faith, truth, morality, knowledge, beauty; they poison all that is the permanent treasure of humanity by making their own fragmentation obligatory by reference to them.

[Translation not available in English]

"

Observe the uninterrupted flow of phenomena: all different and always different and yet always the same. Observe the aches and pains of your body: from the dull ache to the sharp flash of pain, how many varieties! And they are constantly changing, layered on top of each other, like the motifs of a musical score, or the lacework of leaves, twigs and flowers on a tree. Observe the intertwining of goodwill, passion, lies, violence in history, in the present and in your own everyday life: all that you know to be bad, ugly, petty, in itself, weaves itself into a harmony as harmonious as the wandering of clouds or the chain of mountain peaks.
Life must be understood like a piece of music. If you can disassociate yourself from all the pleasant or unpleasant effects that the things of life, one by one, have on your individuality: you will recognize the common beauty in the play of the waves and the aches and pains of your body and the alternation of events and the flow of your feelings and thoughts and everything. All different and always different and yet always the same. Pay attention not to the role and effect of things, but to their pattern and pace: only in this way can you understand life, nature, your fellow human beings and yourself.

[Translation not available in English]

"

That which has not yet started on the road, or is at the beginning of the road - the stone, the baby - has not yet acquired any treasure for itself, and is in itself worthy of love. And the being who has arrived at perfection, who has already absorbed the treasures he has acquired and has nothing, just like the stone or the infant: he is also worthy of love in itself. And the not-yet-departed and the already-arrived are the same.
The man on the way of increase, who is crumbling under half-acquired truncated treasures, can only be loved from the delusion of the mischief of idle treasures, or from kinship, or from compassion, or from the heatless, perfect equanimity of infinite love.

[Translation not available in English]

"

I heard it from my painter friend Árpád Illés:
- There is nothing distasteful in nature. In fact: it even corrects and repairs human bad taste. Look at a tramcar: a yellowed, hideous box.
But if you look at the city from the hill, the colours match and the moving little yellow trams enrich the view. Or buy an ugly chandelier, the kind you see in most bourgeois homes: take it out to the woods, bury it in the ground among the roots, go get it in a few months and you'll see nature beautify it as much as possible.
I have heard this from him and other painters:
- It's worth contemplating the patches and cracks forming on damp, decaying walls. There are no nicer drawings, no nicer groups of colours anywhere. The solid or thousand-spined lines of the stains are in a perfect harmony that human art can only attain in its purest periods. And of the most varied colours, the greens, blues, yellowish tints of grey, reds, dull-greens, rust-colours, always in simple and vast harmony. But the human eye is accustomed to fairground junk and has difficulty adjusting to the divine-beautiful.

"

The potential to create is within man and his means, but artistic creation is a superhuman miracle.
What makes beautiful works of art beautiful, we search in vain among the facts of the phenomenal world. Masterpieces may be simple, complex, ordered, personal, perfect, primitive; so too are works of contemplation. It is only that the masterpiece has that wonderful elasticity which is lacking in the contemporaneous work and which cannot be deduced from the circumstances of the phenomenal world.
In the masterpiece, through the imagination of the creator and the artist, the timeless is transcended into the temporal world.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

"Is jasmine gentle, or do I have the gentleness that jasmine evokes? Is the marigold insidious, or do I have the insidiousness that the marigold evokes?" "The outside and the inside are essentially the same."
"Is the grain of dust small, or is there in me the smallness that the grain of dust evokes? Is the mountain large, or do I have the greatness that the mountain recalls?"
"The outer and the inner are essentially the same."

[Translation not available in English]

"

Read poems in languages you don't understand. Not a lot, just a few lines at a time, but several in a row. Ignore their meanings, but if possible know their original pronunciation and sound.
This way you will get to know the music of languages and the inner music of the creative souls. And you can come to the point where you can read the texts of your mother tongue independently of their content; only in this way can you experience the inner, true beauty of the poem, its disembodied dance.

"

The imagination links the temporal with the timeless, which is why its contents are half-measures: they have a temporal, changing mode of appearance and a timeless, unchanging essence. The contents of the imagination: a religious concept, a moral law, an artistic creation, change their mode of appearance and eventually perish; their essence is non-existent and non-vanishing.
Religions, myths, methods of divination are created by the human imagination, like works of art. Which does not mean that they are invalid; in fact, it means that they are valid. Because imagination, unlike emotion and reason, does not operate according to the contingency of the temporal world, but according to the law of the timeless.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

In nature, there are always beautiful shapes and groups of colours. Look at a worm or a piece of manure: it too has a beautiful colour and shape.
If man takes something from nature to mould it to his own wishes, he more or less eclipses the original beauty, and makes it sometimes beautiful, mostly ugly.
Nature is the infinite creator of infinite beauty. Human creations are works of finite creation of varying beauty.

"

The young face, with its alternating fairies of joy and sadness: a moving, sparkling, swirling, seductive beauty.
The old face, with its firm forms, its even network of wrinkles: an uninviting, introspective, majestic, serene beauty.
Today's man is attracted by sensuality, he knows only the seductive-beautiful, and has few eyes for the great beauty of the old face.
And they mostly despise their young faces, make them the poster of their sex: and they despise their old faces, for they keep the miserable wreck of youth upon them.

[Translation not available in English]

"

The main form of disruption of completeness is that it becomes female and male. The infant who is only approaching womanhood or manhood is as complete as the being who rises above individual separateness, who unites womanhood and manhood, dissolves them into the unchangeable.
Just as the female body and the male body need to be completed, so the female soul and the male soul are incomplete. Woman knows not light, man knows not warmth. Woman lacks the true creative power, man lacks the true life-force. Woman, if she strives for the lasting treasure of humanity, only truly grasps what is in her like a moving, lively, effervescent event: she regards the temple of creation as a snack-bar, a gossip corner. The man, when he is in the sweet games and warm intimacy of human breeding, becomes obscured, mechanized: he sees the temple of life as an occasion for comfort. The woman floats in the moving, hot current of life, detached, and only looks at that which is organically connected, breeding, nature: the man paddles in the universe, enclosed, and contemplates the objects of his interest as islands.
If a man sometimes sees into the soul of a woman, or observes a woman hidden beneath her own male being: he sees that in the reddish twilight, formless things that are washed into each other live in a hot pulsation like germs: if a man's soul or a man's being hidden within himself is revealed to the woman: she sees that things shimmer in a bluish grey light, separated from each other, statue-like.
A woman, when she works, radiates her joys, her sorrows, her whole world into her work; a man, when he works, shuts everything else out. The woman, when she plays cards, dissolves herself in the group of players and wants to win from the players: the man, when he plays cards, is drawn to the vicissitudes of the game and wants to win at the game. A woman, when she opens an orange and offers you a few cloves of it with a good heart, has almost opened herself, offering you from her own world of feeling what is hers to give you: a man, when he offers you food with a good heart, is glad to give you what is his. A woman wants to merge the life of the man she loves with her own life; a man wants to draw the woman he loves more closely to his own being. The woman seeks in love the intoxicating fulfilment of her life; the man seeks in love the intoxicating, ever-increasing wholeness of his.
The needs of woman and man do not overlap: that is why the woman's complement is not the excellent creative man, but the cavalier who is always hurrying and who is always carrying her along, dazzling her again and again, until this double flight finally becomes a family security; and the complement of the man is not the excellent, vitalizing woman, but the enchantress, who can stimulate his senses, and through this, enrapture his whole being, and, moreover, take over his convictions, his preferences, his plans. As it is rare for a woman to find in one person the cavalier and the head of the family, and a man the enchantress and the adaptable, hence the many disappointments.
A man's being is a hard core, a woman's being is all references. Family, wealth and other circumstances are, for the man, the shapers of his life: for the woman, life itself. A man can be truly known by examining him in himself, free from his circumstances; a woman by examining her relations to people and circumstances.
If a woman's novel is about the 'ideal man': a great conqueror of women, the perfect head of a family, a brave and decisive man, a man of great talent in everything, but we do not know where all this excellence fits in, because his being is no more than a dressed-up man-face in a clothes shop window. And the 'ideal woman' in the man's novel is all rosy delicacy and golden cleverness, but the only real aspect of her is that she is madly in love with the male hero, with whom the writer and the reader identify themselves involuntarily: she floats through the world as groundlessly as the sweet angels in Christmas cards.
Which is worth more: the woman or the man? It doesn't matter. Either can reach the ultimate: wholeness. But each in a different way: the man develops his own closed being into an ever more open, fuller one; the woman, like a soft warmth, flies into the ultimate soft, warm nest.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

"Come fly with me," says the wasp to the flower.
"Cling to the branch beside me," says the flower to the wasp.

"

Take care whether you think light or dark; for what you have thought you have created.
Nature creates in the natural world, the soul in the spiritual world. When you make a garment, furniture, whatever, you first think it out, that is, you create it in the world of the soul, and only then do you make it in the world of nature, with your natural tools. Your true creation is not in nature, but in the soul; one is sooner or later destroyed, another is ingrained in the moment of its creation. And he who exists not in the present, nor in time, but pervades the whole of time: he watches your creation.

[Translation not available in English]

"

The most common and typical symptom of a disordered, foggy mind is hatred of a community. The cause of all trouble is the Jews, or: the Catholics, or: the money-men, etc.: the hated community must be destroyed and all will be well. Angry outbursts against the group in question, but preferably when there is no possibility of unpleasantness. And the hatred for one member of the hated community is considerably less than for the community as a whole; the closest good friends are the exception, only the rest are fiery.
Such hatred is very easily infected, for it is easier and more convenient to vent the bitterness and disappointment of our failures by a general fit of temper than to control ourselves. In fact, there is no group of people more justifiable to hate than, for example, the fat or the tall.
Ask yourself often: "Is there a community or individual I would lustfully harm?" And if there is, seek out the cause of your grievance; you will find that the real cause is never in the person, even if he may have been a nuisance to you, but in yourself, in your unfulfilled desires. By revenge, or idle hatred, you will not improve anything, but you will poison your own soul.

[Translation not available in English]

"

Don't have the seeds of any social betterment in you. For every abstract community is a mist; and he who runs in the mist will sooner or later stumble on the living.
Respect and cherish your narrow and wider home: family, nation, humanity. But do not confuse any of these with those who claim harm by reference to these concepts.
What is harmful? if thou wouldst help Peter by restraining Paul.
"I identify with Peter, I dislike Paul; I kiss Peter, I beat Paul" - this is sentimentality; this is the common skeleton of public thought; the present age begs for. The only way to help anybody is not at the expense of others.
You can improve your people and humanity only by improving yourself.
Truth can never redeem mankind, always only the one-man.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

There are four types of leader: Procrustes, Napoleon, Uncle Sam and Solon.
Procrustes is an advocate of an idea that he wants to force his nation into, if it breaks, if it tears.
Napoleon is a passionate gambler, and whether he wins or loses, he will always be wasted.
Uncle Sam sits in the royal hall like in a spice shop, cunning with dekagrams and dimes.
Solon is attentive to divine inspiration, all his actions spring from eternal measure and his kingdom flourishes.

"

"What you give to me, you give to all", proclaims the power on earth.
"What you give to all, you give to me," proclaims the heavenly power.

[Translation not available in English]

"

The most egregious examples of sentimentality are novels and films where characters can be separated into groups of good and evil. The most angelic are the protagonists, with whom the reader cries and laughs, almost merging with them; but if we look closely at these protagonists, they are not so much angels: they are driven by their petty, greedy, sweet desires. The other characters are classified as good and sympathetic or evil and hateful according to whether they support or hinder the protagonists. Most people today look at the world in the way of sentimental novels: those who are guided by their desires and those who support those desires are the good; those who hinder their desires are the bad.
Today's average man's knowledge is astonishingly simple-minded. Most men of today see only the surface of you that you present to their likes and wants; they do not look at your inner self; women judge you by whether you amuse and excite them, men by how you fit into their principles, plans, and convictions. Exchanges the good for the attractive, the seductive; no wonder that in private life as well as in public life is mostly led by adventurers. He is perpetually disappointed and disillusioned; he blames all the powers of heaven and earth, the wickedness of others, sometimes even his own folly; only he does not think of looking at his fellow-men not through his needs, but through their selves.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Do not covet anyone's love. Refuse no one's love.
Let your love shine like the light of a fire: equally on all. Let those who come near you have more of your light and warmth than those who do not need you. May your family members, your daily companions, and those who turn to you be to you as the room of the stove to which you are assigned to warm it.

[Translation not available in English]

"

Let not your love be like hunger, greedily choosing between the edible and the inedible; but like light, shedding its light with serenity on all before it.
When your love begins to choose, it is no longer love, but a duality of craving and disgust. And this: the sentimentality that is more dangerous than anything else today; its sugary secretion has smeared mankind.
Of all human emotions, sentimentality is the most miserable. To love in one direction is to hate in the other; his affection salivates, his hatred spits. It has no constant measure, it measures all things to its own swirling formlessness; wherever it turns, no good comes of it.
The most dangerous devil-marriage of the present age is the union of Mistress Sentimentality and Mr. Propaganda. Whatever nonsense propaganda wants to get accepted, it shapes it in such a way as to provoke from the sentimentality of the masses a stir in one direction and indignation in another, and it has a winning cause.
Sentimentality is a two-headed female: one head smiles sweetly and kisses greedily, the other sheds tears, bites and pokes. Its kissing head is now almost universally confused with goodness, love, morality, domesticity, taste, idealism, and its biting head with law, justice, retribution, and justice.
The sickness of our age, the spiritual groundlessness and general confusion, stems from this: the smile and the tears of the double-headed beast. It has done more harm than any other passion: it has confounded common sense.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Whichever nation wants to be superior to other nations: becomes an executioner or a clown.
The life of their nation is polluted by those who extol the real or supposed virtues of their nation and refuse to tolerate harsh criticism.
The greatest scourge that can befall a people is to destroy its judgment by one-sided rule. Such a people is debauched, and the more tramp adventurer reaches for it, the more easily it throws itself at him. There is no outside menace, no endless ravages, no millennia of oppression to equal it.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Every manifestation of you that unfolds beautifully, freshly, freely: your gift; every manifestation that stinks of your greed: your excrement. From any one of us there is far more dross than bounty, and there is no remedy for this but to clean up our dross; instead, from the beginning and more and more, European man builds from his dung a system, a law, a morality, which he guards with arms, with money, with the seal of authority, with a prestigious body, and demands of all to conform to these palaces of excrement and solemn statues of dung. These are continually cracking and crumbling, spreading a general stench and itching; and they must be repaired and repaired with more and more fresh and softer dung. By degrees mankind has raised over itself a whole metropolis of excrement, which now, in the twentieth century, has fallen upon its masters. Just as once a flood of fire and water fell upon mankind, which had grown into a giant besieging the sky, now mankind, dwarfed into a manure worshipper, has been overtaken by a flood of dung. For centuries there will be nothing but a stifling stench, a stinking stink, a warfare in filth, with rumbling, roaring, dung-smelling weapons instead of the shining weapons of old, until the man of the manure-age is extinct. He who made the whole globe a cesspool is drowning in it.
What can we do about the flood of manure? hold our noses, nothing else. Because anyone who wants to tear down a manure tower is just moving it from one place to another, and in the process is multiplying the ugliness himself. The flood of manure will drain itself away, slowly, until the man of the manure-age has drowned in it to the last. He who has yielded heart and soul to any direction, system, human contrivance, has been swamped by the dung-flood; he who keeps pure feeling, free vision, eternal measure, floats in an ark above the dung-flood. And as after the flood the rainbow appeared in the heavens, to signify that there shall be no more flood: so shall the pure linen appear in the heavens, to signify that there shall be no more flood of dung.

[Translation not available in English]

"

What can you do about the plunge into darkness, the general destruction, the universal suffering? nothing and everything. This is nothing and everything: if you do not participate in the darkness with your own feelings and create in yourself a state of whole-manhood: you are guided not by your desires but by the eternal measure. Wherever the tide takes you: to misery, to prosperity, to forced labour, to the battlefield, to the driving-place, to the perishing-place: care not; the dark power can give you nothing and take nothing from you, if the only-virtuous measure is at work in you. You may lose your comfort, your wealth, your health, your freedom, your life; you will lose them all sooner or later, you cannot take them to the grave; but the perfect measure in your depths cannot be violated even by the destruction of the world, so you must wish to be true to it. Trust thyself to the eternal measure: it is the Noah's ark above the all-covering flood.
For your fellow human beings you can do no more than let them know the only way of escape. No one can be saved by force when the flood covers everything.
It is not true that in a flood the crowd wants to climb Noah's Ark. The Noah's ark seems to be the weakest, most clumsy piece of wood, worth more than the bottom of a bush.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Some man looks upon religion as a barter: it is man's duty to behave himself, to obey God's commands and the ordinances; it is God's business to provide man with earthly goods in the same proportion as he has behaved himself, obeyed the commands, performed the ordinances. Accordingly, the most religious and best men ought to be the richest, and the non-religious and law-breakers ought to be miserable.
He who is religious in order to obtain the goods he covets in return: he has already proved his greed and unworthiness. The goodness of God is not fattening and not a charitable institution. The unvarying radiance of divine love is like nothing less than charity, the gratification of desires. If you can grow out of your desires, you will reach God.

[Translation not available in English]

"

There are many fervent and militant Catholics, Protestants, Israelites, who believe in God only half-heartedly and cannot believe in the dogmas of their religion at all, yet they will fight for their denomination. Of the locomotive they take only the boiler, which is explosive, but not the wheels, which can be used to walk.

"

To the individual man, pleasure, profit, seems to be the most important thing; he does not distinguish pleasure from good, profit from purpose. He even conceives of the improvement of the destiny of mankind as the putting of as many people as possible in a more pleasant condition. And he conceives of salvation as eternal enjoyment and eternal profit; whereas salvation is the dissolution of the nightmare of the desire for enjoyment and profit.
The desire for pleasure and profit is nothing but an elementary demand arising from your carnal nature; do not let your soul yield to this demand. The soul's elementary need is different: to be in harmony with everything. And the striving for harmony is disturbed by pleasure and profit as soon as it exceeds the need.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Helpless submission is called civic duty, shouting along with the crowd is called courage, sentimentality is called poetic spirit, the rattling of nuts is called progressive spirit, greedy, narrow-minded edulgence is called wit, group boredom is called entertainment, the play of the glands is called pleasure.
The combination of civic duty, courage, poetic spirit, progressive spirit, wit, amusement and pleasure is called social and economic equilibrium.
The social and economic equilibrium becomes more and more delicate: more and more regulations, restrictions, punishments; soon the people will abhor peace more than war; finally, the equilibrium must be maintained by a permanent state of war. The war begins, in which the will to win is only a rhetoric inherited from the past, the real, secret aim is to drag the war on: neither belligerent dares to take on the economic Gordian knot that peace would mean. Those who can be soldiers are glad because they are better provided for and safer than the general population; and they try to get into the field of battle because there the greatest freedom is promised. Peace will not be order, war will not be confusion, but vice versa; it will be an age of perpetual war. Not one moment of it will resemble a game of chess in reverse, where the winner is the one whose pawns have all been knocked out.
This state of affairs is already partially reached. Now comes a short, serene period, but this is just the bait sunshine of the autumn before the long winter. Within thirty years the era will begin when not man will lead the war, but war will lead man.

"

The value of money, wealth, rank, prestige above all else, the economism that today's man sees as the ultimate realism: it is in fact idealism, albeit in a negative and parodic way. Money is not food, not drink, not clothing, not a work of art, something essentially useless, in fact it does not exist, it is a mere idea and ideal; and the accumulation of this fictitious thing is regarded by modern man as the whole of sanity. The accumulated wealth, which over-abounds beyond necessity, is only a nuisance and a problem, and sooner or later it slips out from under its owner, so that even the necessary will not remain. Rank removes all that is tolerable in man, and sets up senseless barriers, which breed hatred and envy. Validation leads nowhere, because there is always further and further down this road, the desire for validation is an unbearable itch, like a skin disease. In addition, modern man is heaping on himself a pile of the most obdurate community principles in impossible handcuffs. In the confusion of obsessions and emotions, community, nation, race, people, home, public safety, duty, the defence of our borders, the raising of our standard of living, the spread of our culture, have become a man-eating idol. If you look around you: prohibition, coercion, slogan, rubbish, drivel, hogwash, propaganda, profiteering, pushing, fear, insecurity. The intolerance of our systems is something that people today groan about the most and would like to compensate for with some pompous respect for culture: each system calls itself the saviour of culture and the others the destroyers of culture. But today's man, this negative idealist, detached from all reality, wants to adore culture in vain, his adoration is an empty set of words, a grab-bag of measures, a constant cloaking of his own yawns; and he sees culture as a fairground gibberish, an incessant saving of people, nations, communities, a tasteless self-adulation of "geniuses", a social event. Culture is static, calm, non-institutionalizable; the more today's fidgety-moving man jumps around it, the more he crushes it. The more he 'takes culture to heart', the more he seems to have no feeling for it; the more he 'saves and protects' it, the more he seems to need a protection of it. He moves money, armies, a deliberately dumbed-down herd of people, and he is destroyed, when a single breath of culture could save him. But that one breath is missing, and the money, the army, the herd of men continue to grind onwards.
There is only one way out of this cave of human suffering of human life, of human emotions, but it will not happen: if humanity were to change to a sober, stable basis: to satisfy its needs and not its fears and emotions. Since there is no hope of this, each man can only create a tolerable world within himself, for himself, if he is strong enough to renounce all prejudices and see with his own eyes, like a child: Everyone can only achieve realism instead of negative idealism, internal, unshakable security instead of the nightmare of external order, money, wealth, rank, prestige. And only the few can achieve it, even for themselves, who have been given the sense to do so.

[Translation not available in English]

"

To say that someone is a "patron of science and art" is almost as ridiculous as saying that a religious person is a "patron of God". Just as God is not dependent on being believed in, science and art are not affected by being cared about. The home of science and art is not existence, the 'esse' , but possibility, the 'posse' , and if it manifests itself in existence, existence is enriched; it is infinite humility on the part of science and art to allow itself to manifest itself in existence, since all its form-filling is handicapped. And if science and art disappear from human destiny: it is not their destruction, but that of their handicapped manifestations, and of the master of these manifestations, man.

"

Why is there a snake at the entrance of the pharmacy? In its place, the modern man could paint some cheerful little pigs, almost bursting with health.
Why is there a blindfolded goddess over the judge's chair? The man of today could take the blindfold off the goddess's eyes: let her be like a saleswoman seeking to please the public.
Why is there a crucified corpse on the altar? The modern man could have replaced it with a street vendor offering his wares.

"

Sin is most dangerous, not when it openly and boldly opposes virtue, but when it disguises itself as virtue and infects the cognitive sense.
The chief vice of love is not hatred, but sentimental benevolence; that of patriotism is not denial of one's nation, but dignified lechery and gibberish patriotism; that of love's morality is not amorous immorality, but social decency, which, while it persecutes unconcealed lust, offers a hundred substitutes for lust.

[Translation not available in English]

"

The invention of our time is compulsory enthusiasm, the revolution institutionalised by authority and the revolt of the oppressors against the oppressed.
Today's regimes of domination are characterised by the fact that they do not necessarily want their lies to be believed, only to be accepted. All military forces must sing about themselves that they are the best, without anyone believing it; all citizens must profess about the head of state that he is wise, heroic, a benefactor, without anyone believing it; and so on.
Now even a plausible lie is an unattainable height. We are in a pit, lower than the bottom of the frog.

[Translation not available in English]

[Translation not available in English]

"

Today's man, disconnected from the universal context of existence, shrunk into individuality, will soon lose his individuality, not upwards, but downwards. Since he cannot rise above his individuality, he will fall below it. Soon it will be officially decreed which leader's picture you must hang on the wall, what books and other objects you may have, what you may eat and when, and not only work but also entertainment will be compulsory, in a prescribed way and at a prescribed time; and people who have sunk below their individuality will like it. After a thousand years of European man's individualism, in which he has pitted his personal whims against universal possibilities, now the diabolical order of whims is submerging not only his individuality but his humanity.
And the man of today would be content and happy with this, if the barn were not continually swirling around him.

"

Self-torture is mostly a dead end; sometimes a big detour; very rarely the shortest way.
For most people, a complete abandonment of pleasure is as harmful as indulgence in pleasure. And what lies between the two, moderation ("I enjoy, but in small doses, cautiously, sparingly"): it is constricting.
Educate your desires so that they are not directed towards pleasures and benefits: this avoids both renunciation, self-indulgence and moderation. Shape your desires in such a way that whether you receive the pleasures and benefits of life or the lack of them casually, you need not worry too much about whether you are receiving them or not. If your world of feeling is directed not to the variable but to the constant, if you look at the variable from the outside, as a stranger, if you seek harmony with everything, if you look to the eternal measure: thus you will draw the fangs of your life desires, and the benefits and harms of life will no longer be a danger to you, but will only affect you superficially.