Quotes

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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.

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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.

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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

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There is no right to any behavior that seeks to build a way of life and an agenda outside the human order. For man, the things and actions of the world have meaning only as long as they seek to influence men and interact with the human world. This cooperation can be direct or indirect. But no one has the right to live for his own sake, indeed, he has no right even to create.

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Every time I went to the doctor, I couldn't escape the embarrassing and humiliating feeling that I was deceiving the good man who, according to his craft and knowledge of human nature, was treating me with concern and care, but in a completely hopeless way. For all that he could offer - remedies, various cures, water or rays, powders, and liquids - might have cured my kidneys, my liver, or my heart, but could not cure what is the sole cause of my illness: my way of life, which is the result of my character, my basic nature and inclination. Therefore, seriously and politely, to the best of our ability, we have always deceived each other, the doctor and the patient. Lifestyles cannot be cured, nor can they be changed, except temporarily.

That is why nature, wisely, takes care of diseases: because most people only rest their passions temporarily in the forced quarantine of ailments. "Il est quelque fois saine d'être malade!" - said a Frenchman. Most men would die at the age of forty-five if they did not rest for a few weeks in their sickbeds.

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Whenever I have been attacked and chased - and in the course of a writer's career these chases inevitably recur, sometimes with life-threatening twists and turns - I have found that the writer under attack cannot be protected by any outside help. Not by the powers that be, not by the courts, not by the help of his peers, not even by the voluntary encouragement of well-meaning people and the wisdom of the experienced. The writer is protected only by his works. It is not even the quality of his works, which is always uneven, but the intention that shines through the work of a writer's life. It is this mysterious radiance and power that gives the writer a kind of - relative - inviolability. A writer can only fail if it can be proved that the intention of his work is not sincere. Then the writer and his work commit hara-kiri. Everything else counts for little: neither the accusation nor the defense.

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There are incurably wounded people who are so deeply infected by greed, vanity, and envy that there is no way to reach out and atone for their sick souls. Pity these, but avoid them. No generous act, unselfish conduct, or courageous and noble approach can help these people. Envy especially torments these people. They vomit bile, they cry out in their sleep, they toss and turn in their dens like epileptics, and they spit up foam when they see that someone has earned or achieved something in life through work or the benevolence of a gracious fate. They are sick, infectious sick. Avoid their company, don't think that argument or proof can ever convince them. It's like trying to prove to a leper that the healthy are innocent and guiltless! He doesn't believe it. If you reveal to them the real cause of their illness, they will hate you. If you try to appeal to their feelings, they'll grab a stick. They live in their passions as deeply as the fate of the exile: they know no other way but revenge. Do not bargain with them, avoid them, and bear their existence on earth as a blow of fate.

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I, for example, although I was already a grown man, got into swimming and tennis. I particularly took a liking to tennis when I was in my forties; it is the only humanistic sport; man against man, with all the strength one can muster, but there is always a distance between the combatants, they do not touch. Just as Luther never saw Erasmus, with whom he dueled for a lifetime. And swimming, how good it was, especially in the sea! To swim for a long time, in the deaf, solid water, as if one were returning home to the primordial elements of existence! However, I found these exercises distracted me from my work. They are pleasant for my body, but not good for my soul. And what is not good for my work and my soul is ultimately not good for my body. Therefore I have reduced these pleasures, and in all this, there has been much vanity; to keep young and healthy!... But it is not my business to be young and healthy, nay, not even my business to keep myself free from disease. There is only one thing for a man destined for spiritual work: spiritual work. Perhaps walking is the only kind of exercise we can afford; like prisoners who circle the prison yard for an hour a day. Work is the greatest bondage.

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And accidents, which do not exist - like witches - are no longer to be mentioned. I do not believe in accidents. There is only carelessness. You get hit by a tram, your luggage is stolen on the way, an impudent blackmails you and insults your name, and you spoil your stomach with food and drink - and then what? Why weren't you more careful? The world is dangerous, and the possibility of accident lurks in every situation and action of life, this danger and chance is clear with human life. Yes, perhaps it is this chance that gives one a deeper hold and tension. Just think, what would human life and the world be like without the chance of an accident? How brashly self-assured, how unabashedly arrogant and haughty it would be! No, the possibility of an accident lurks in your every moment, objects, situations, people, chemicals, static and physical formulas: it's all against you too. So beware. Not anxiously, but in a way befitting your humanity, seriously and objectively, very carefully. And always know that it is not the world's wiles that have arbitrarily broken against you when the accident occurs, but you who have been weak, lazy, and petty. There is no "tram accident". It's just you and the tram and the world order.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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Your attitude to the world and to life should be pathos-free, without sentimentalism. But there is more to work, to create: it requires dreaming, it requires pathos and tide, it requires emotional exuberance. Great creations cannot be calculated with a cold head, on paper, and a pencil; just as one cannot create by speculation at all, nor can one make children according to plans on paper and in pencil. You also need feeling, passion, devotion, and flow to create. A Catholic education leaves much imagination and emotion in the soul, and such a soul may not stand well the hard and primitive trials of the commonplace - its feelings are carried away - but it will be susceptible to the problems of creation. Protestant education teaches dispassion and fatalism, and for everyday use, this is perhaps the most useful. It is true that the self-consciousness of fatalism can only create hard lives; less often and with difficulty, great works. Therefore thou must, on Mondays and Tuesdays, when thou must bury thy sweethearts, or fight with thy impudent adversaries, remain hard and unemotional; and strive to dream, and fear not the tide when thou art creating.