Quotes by Hamvas Béla

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One has to go crazy to be normal and lose one's mind in order to wake up and come to know that one is alive, finally not to be a dreamer and a fantasist, but a normal person.

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Those who stop writing can enjoy the written word of others without jealousy.

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The center of every soul is the Self.

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If a person does not know who he is, does he not have the duty to find himself?

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What is it when waiting is futile and there is nothing left to wait for? People are waiting to no longer have to wait for anything or anyone, no longer have to stop and stare into the faceless darkness, no more thresholds and hallways and prisons and hanging around, no more having to look at the clock every five minutes where nothing is happening and will never happen. nothing.

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To be is to suffer. Anyone who escapes from this knowledge is lost in an endless escape from reality.

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The secret of a great man is that he is the only man who has no secret. He is the universal and the general and the natural and the simple and the real man.

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You don't reach your goal when you've exhausted everything, but when you've found the inexhaustible.

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The whole of existence is permanently and perfectly open to everyone, and everyone lives as much of it as they want.

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Life doesn't run out. You can't get life from someone else. Life is enriched in the proportion in which it is scattered.

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A liberated person knows that if he keeps his freedom to himself in order to enjoy it, he will lose it, because he will fall into the captivity of his freedom.

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Every step on the way to light evokes deeper darkness.

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This is the activity: to raise up the fallen, to find the lost, to clean the soiled, to polish the tarnished, to reassemble the broken, to convert and reconcile the rebellious. In a word: redeem. The meaning of human activity is to elevate the world into the spiritual world, that is, to turn it into gold.

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There is some incomprehensible connection between friendship and the star. Why is the friend a star? And why is the star a friend? Because it is so far away and yet lives in me? (...) Because he doesn't want anything from me and I don't want anything from him either? Just let it be, and as it is; and he is, and I am, is that perfectly enough for the two of us? It cannot be answered. You don't have to.

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It's good to think things through; most of the time, you get somewhere, if not quite where you wanted to be.

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The act drags the person along. Where? Into the consequences. From which you cannot escape.

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It is not the one who remains hard who wins, but the one who softens and gives in and accepts and gives up and dissolves himself. Giving up is not a sign of weakness, but of strength.

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The one who gives is more in need of acceptance than the one who accepts is the giver.

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I'm. Polite. Patient. It's easy to be patient when you don't love... Kindness is not a substitute for love. Without love you must go crazy.

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The only way to get to yourself is through the world, and you can't love yourself if you don't love others.

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But desire, if one wants it for oneself, has an unspeakable danger. This is the danger that the desire is fulfilled, and then the person achieves what he wanted. You will reach and see what it was that you desired and demanded and longed for. (...) And now it turns out that the desire was false. He didn't want that either.

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Life where it springs is a pure, sweet delight that is in life itself. To not go away from the source is to be a virgin. The Etruscans carved flowers on their women's tombstones, no name, no other, no age, no rank. What does the tombstone say? The one who lies here was a flower, able to live what the wise could only imagine.

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The pub, one of the most important institutions of our civilization, is much more important than, for example, the parliament. In one place the wounds are divided, in the other they are healed.

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Things do not begin without but within, and not below but above, and not in the visible but in the invisible.

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A person is only given a very small task, and our problem is that we want to solve too much, instead of noticing the small.

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I dismiss you as well as everyone else: you are responsible for every person who lives with you, and you must account for every penny you spend on yourself, every joy you keep inside yourself, and every happy moment you keep to yourself. Now come and live, because the world is yours!

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Friendship is deeper than love and deeper than love.

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Once. Always just once. Always first, always last. Not to seek the law. To be free. Not to adapt. To decide. Not the habit. The unexpected. The adventure. The danger. The risk. Courage... to stand on the threshold. To be in constant transition. To die alive or to live dead. Whoever has achieved this is free. And if he is free, he will realize that he deserves nothing but the most.

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Life has meaning, not purpose.

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What we call sensual experience arose in the place of lost, direct knowledge. Man sees because he is blind and hears because he is deaf. What we call sensual activity is a fainting of the senses, complete oblivion, distance and burial.

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Nothing is more important than having a constant relationship with the incomprehensible.

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For one to live, one must burn, be focused, ignite and kindle.

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Drinking has the same law as love: anywhere, anytime, any way.

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The eye sees in a system: one eye in the system of the prison, the other in the system of the brothel, the system of the fair, the children's room, statistics, double bookkeeping, the graph system. There are incredibly few clear eyes that see in the system of sea and starry sky and live like a brother to the trees.

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A woman forgets her friends, never her loves. A man forgets his loves, never his friends.

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There are four forms of friendship: heroic, intimate, spiritual and playful. But true friendship unites all four, and therefore it can be safely said that these are the four dimensions of friendship. Heroism is to sacrifice my life for it; the spiritual is that where I am with him is his spiritual world; the game is that I play with it as merrily as a child; what is intimate is revealing myself.

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Love and friendship have only one related feature, and this: if it breaks up, the cause is never the Other, but always the Self.

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All friendships begin with the vague feeling that we've met somewhere. It's like we were brothers a long time ago. And that's why the meeting is just a reunion. And when a man is separated from his friend, he knows that this separation is only an appearance. Somewhere she stays with him the way she was with him before they met.

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If you haven't found the real positive answer to your question, it doesn't mean that the answer doesn't exist, but that you haven't searched enough.

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The word is the true text of being; the true content and meaning and decipherment of the whole story.

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Life only begins when one does not know what will happen.

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The sensitivity of the soul to the soul: love.

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You may have left me - but I will not leave you!

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The big word of the human world: love.

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Only water really knows what is horizontal.

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Happiness can only be sustained by those who share it. Light becomes a blessing only in those who give it to others.

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I abhor being a hero, or a saint, or a sage. And I'm not interested in my biography. I want to be a normal person.

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Only those who take it entirely upon themselves can cast off their fate. Humility. Sacrifice. Service. Patience.

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Only errors need a theory. - Only the weak need power.

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For my friend, I will always feel that he is a star, the shining of the universe on me.

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Fertilized by its own image, the human heart has been pregnant and pregnant for countless millennia: with itself.

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They say love makes a poet. Often. Friendship makes life poetic and poetry. Poetry soon comes out of love, because everything is just a tool for love to integrate the two greatest opposites of the universe, man and woman. Friendship itself is this poetic relationship. And we don't write poems, we live them.

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Do what you want. But you will always know what you were afraid of. To be afraid is to die. It's like missing out. As much as ever. Never. Understand, never, ever again. The order of your life is not how to. Because you don't need anything. There is no compulsion. But know that you can never do that here again. What you don't do here, today, now, you will never know. What you are afraid to do now, you have lost forever.

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What there is, only gains importance in the broadcast. And in this relationship, the one who gives is bound more deeply than the one who receives, because he is not bound by need, but by abundance.

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The consequence of the slightest dimness of the mind is that one does not perceive reality, but a delusion.

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There is nothing more hopeless than someone who has no one with whom he can stand in justice.

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Life is not for me to practice the qualities I have, but to acquire the ones I don't have.

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The only value, the base: life. Everything else follows from this one. Make the most of your life.

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A person can exert a very significant force to become more and more insignificant.

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A man dies the moment he is born, even if that moment lasts for eighty years.

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Providence does not interfere in human destiny, because that would be a violation of freedom, it does not do such a thing. What it does is that it constantly offers situations that, if we choose correctly, will lift us up, if we are stupid, of course we will stay where we were, or sink even more.

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I don't believe in the dictionary anymore, since the law means that whoever lies more can knock out the teeth of the one who lies less.

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Love is an inverted friendship, so that something always flows from one to the other. Love is sometimes like being two at once, when it was always two, and only love made it one. And friendship is sometimes like two out of one, even though it was always one, only friendship made it two.

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Friendship does not come from honesty, but honesty comes from friendship.

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If I love the One, the world becomes one, I only need to love one in order to love everything, and in this love the secret of everything is revealed.

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A person's ability to tolerate justice begins with humor. Vain women, bad politicians, presumptuous artists are afraid of being laughed at.

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A person's seriousness begins at the limit of what can be said to him.

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Everyone wants to serve what they get first, and they have worldview principles that will ensure their next month's paycheck. We live not from work, but from lies. The mere presence of one such creature poisons the lives of a thousand people.

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Nineteen fifty-six was betrayed by the entire literature, the entire press, music, painting, art, society, science, and politics. Why did you tell him? You just have to live.

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The whole world is yours. You are free from stones to ether. Get to know it, conquer it, no one forbids it, but woe to you if you keep it to yourself. What you do not give to others, be it gold, turns to mud; be a holy light, it becomes a curse; let it be beauty, it becomes death.

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The world has always favored thoughts that inspire terror. People, especially the masses, like to be afraid.

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If the truth leaves him, it is his business; it is my business not to leave him and to remain faithful to him.

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People generally believe that sin is the cause of all problems. By crime they mean that someone lies, steals, cheats, robs, kills and commits adultery. Their ignorance goes so far as to enact extremely loud laws against this crime, in which they even threaten the gallows. Although these laws are many, many thousands of years old, they have not yet had any results.

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If I could, for example, I would extract her spiritual being from a beautiful girl and purify, condense, distill, filter, crystallize it until I get her imperishable and concentrated essence. After all, every beautiful woman could be made into a gem. Or wine.

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If a woman came to me and asked how to be beautiful, I would answer her: come to the sun, my dear. Only what is in the sun can be beautiful.

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The world is as it is, it was never perfect (...). But whether we participate in the destruction or not is entirely up to us.

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We are born into the world with our navel in our mother's womb. When we are born, with our mouths. The eye is among our senses the abstract; he never comes into direct contact with the object he sees and cannot grow with it. The ear drops things a little closer. The hand will take it. The nose absorbs even the vapor of things. The mouth takes what it desires. And I only know what something is when I've tasted it. The mouth is the source of direct experience.

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All wine (...) is social and reveals its true essence when drunk in community.

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Try to be honest without psychology. To love without ME, to see God without religion. Just the way it really is. Somehow from the heart and with joy.

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Now I meet him, who knows that I am coming just as I do, that he is waiting for me, him who sees the meaning of his every step in bringing him closer to me, him who looks searchingly into the eyes of every stranger: if it is me, if he gets on a train, he gets up thinking that I'll wait for him inside, he hears a name, feels that it's mine, a voice, and thinks it's me, him, I'll finally meet him there in the major, he lies under the trees and waits, while reading that the time hit him, when he sees him, he gets up and comes, he comes without asking, without saying a word, at that moment everything is solved. (...) I am quite calm. I don't have an iota of anxiety. For the first time in my life, I'm not afraid.

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The order of things is that a person not only lies, but also has to prove that he is right.

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Man's capacity for assimilation is limitless. Haeckel says that if you don't burn to ashes, you can get used to hell in hours.

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As for the world being the way it is, I am not willing to accept any complaints from anyone. It shouldn't have been so readily agreed to make it so, and it doesn't have to be so readily agreed to keep it that way.

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Aldous Huxley calculated that the circle of silence shrinks by thirteen and a half kilometers every year. The time is not far off when silence will completely disappear from the earth. Happy will be the one who sometimes manages to enjoy half an hour of peace in the Himalayas or on the ocean. The circle of intimacy is getting smaller and smaller.

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In the great moments of love, when the wall between the outer and inner world collapses and you no longer know where is outside and where is inside, the body becomes the soul and the soul becomes the body.

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I choose the garden and the library room, silent walks, wordless prayer and quiet sitting. Why? Because this way I get immeasurably more of what I need. A life lived in solitude is infinitely richer than a life lived in public. I want to live my life for myself, not for the public.

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It's hard to fool a person. You can't tell him to come here, you'll get more here. After a while he realizes the deception and then it's over. And man is an unimaginably hungry creature. He always goes where he has more lives. (...) You always need more, the brighter, the more fiery, the more interesting, the more serious, the more exciting, the more effective, the more captivating.

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I can control myself in all my actions and thoughts and in every moment of my life. Not in love: here you have to give yourself up completely. (...) I cannot give myself up just like that, without anything further. There is no way I can get myself back. The one I get back is no longer who I was. It is more, richer, simpler, purer and more divine. This is the secret of love. I must be lost and destroyed.

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My friend is only the one I freely choose for myself.

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The secret of love is that two become one, the secret of friendship is that one becomes two.

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Friendship is not a simple association, just as a friend is not a mere companion. Not a comrade, not a colleague, not a partner. No other relationship can replace what happens to a person in the house of friendship. A friend cannot be replaced by anyone.

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Someone either lives, and the price of life is pollution, or he does not want to be polluted, but then he is forced to give up life.

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He who gives up himself will never be freed from the one who sees all this.

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A person reads many thousands of books, most of them are forgotten in a week. In a man's life he sees and hears many thousands of paintings, pieces of music, sculptures, and landscapes, and there are ten, twenty, or thirty that accompany him for a long time, like a friend or a beloved. There are very few thoughts in a person's life that they will never part with. The many thousands of books are daily food, which by providing pleasure for a certain period of time has fulfilled its task. The ten, twenty, or thirty images, or pieces of music or poems that accompany a person for a long time are intimate life partners.

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Many, many millions of people live fifty and sixty and more years, and never remember that they are alive, they are just here, somehow here, in a looming, dreamlike state.

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Love is when I take on someone's difficulties in order to make their life better.

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Man begins by creating something that does not exist. To be someone from nothing. Not looking for the least, but the greatest resistance. Only the impossible is worth doing.

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There is no mystery in the high road. The effect of the sky: to be good, the effect of the earth is abundance, the effect of man is order. Everyone needs only one thing, to live righteously.

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What is earthly is for me. Infinitely at my expense. Nothing torments me more than my physical needs: a warm room, clothes, food, especially food, hunger. Hard slavery. Being addicted to the body.

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He is not smart who is not a little crazy, and he is not healthy who is not a little sick.

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The person I lie to hates me less than I have to hate the person I lied to.

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Loneliness is hard. Looking out into the gray twilight in the morning in November, coming out onto the porch - and there is no one, no one. Gray fog settles on brown leaves on the mountainside. This feeling can only be cured with the strongest antidote. What is that? The knowledge that man can experience the greatest beauties of the world alone, and not in imagination, as satisfaction, but as the eternal one who is closest to everything. Man can live happily only in community, but God can only be in solitude.

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According to Nietzsche, what one lies to others is nothing compared to what one lies to oneself.

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The world is the place where things are not as they are, but as they act. In the world, a person is not judged by his real life, but by his performance as an actor.

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Wealth, joy, knowledge, talent can be acquired, but woe to those who are not strong enough for it.