Quotes

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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.

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I have experienced that there is order at the bottom of human life. And since human life is the most complex manifestation of Creation, there is likely order elsewhere, in the more primitive and simple world of existence, like rocks, raccoons, reptiles, and planetary stars. There is order in everything, things come to us even if we do not lift a finger, and there is order in the fact that we occasionally lift a finger or our soul to make things come to us, to make us come to certain situations, people, thoughts, with which we are personally, inevitably involved. There is order in all this, I believe.

But I also believe that there is an intention behind this order that I do not know. Call it what you will. I call it Providence. This intention cares for me personally, punishes me, guides me, arranges my affairs, pushes me into the abyss, controls me at every moment, builds the world around me builds me in the world, and uses me. He who does not perceive this in time is blind and deaf. Behind everything is Providence: this too I believe.

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Take care never to rush, and in your work, in your social life, and yes, in your everyday actions, to obey the strict consistency of facts and situations. Do not try to do two things with two hands at the same moment. When writing a letter, do not listen to the telephone receiver. When you smoke, don't try to cure your tracheitis at the same time. When you read, don't listen to music. Above all: pay attention to the deep order of tasks and situations. There's dexterity at the bottom of human tasks; it's not a bad thing to learn. If you hold something, hold it with both hands and firmly; if you let go of something, let it go consciously and with all consequences; if you speak, let your word stand in time like a stone; if you are happy about something, be happy without reservation. There is a craft in life, and there is a craft in the common days. And Mondays have their unskilled. Watch your movements. The cause of most human misfortunes is not Greek misfortune, but clumsiness, idleness, and sloth. Learn this craft, this life, and remain the master of life in motion and action.

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No human relationship is more poignant and deeper than friendship. In the relationship between lovers, yes, even between parents and children, how much selfishness and vanity! Only a friend is not selfish; otherwise, he is not a friend. Only a friend is not vain, because he wants all that is good and beautiful for his friend, not for himself. The lover always wants something; the friend wants nothing for himself. A child always wants to receive from his parents, to outshine his father; a friend neither wants to receive nor to outdo. There is no more secret and noble gift in life than friendship, which is unassuming, understanding, patient, and sacrificial. And there is none rarer.

Montaigne, reflecting on the feeling that had drawn him to La Boétie, said, "We were friends... Because he was he, and because I was I." This is more than accurate. And Seneca writes to Lucilius: "A friend loves, but a lover is not always a friend." This statement is more than accuracy: it is truth. All love is suspect because selfishness and miserliness lurk in its ashes. Only the affection of a friend is unselfish, without interest or the play of the senses. Friendship is a service, a strong and serious service, the greatest human test and role.

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Are you smug and proud to think that you have read and understood a few books, enriched your knowledge, and learned something about nature or the human spirit? Do you feel "educated", better than the ignorant? Think of the infinite mass of knowledge contained in the sum total of books, and what more would you need to know and read to fully understand a single book? Think of the iron racks that run around the library of the British Museum, how long you would have to live to know something of the material of thought which the books piled up there enclose! But stay in your library, and confess how many books you have not read among those that line your bookshelves, and how many, even among those you have read, you have fully understood and followed with all attention. No, "education", when it comes face to face with the universe of the human spirit, is a barren and vain attitude. Think rather that to understand, to grasp, to feel a single piece of knowledge, demands the fullness of life's efforts. And think, too, how much has been written and thought before you, what oceans of thought rest in the past, and with what a rush of fall in every new age the wealth of human thought flows from the sum of appearances and phenomena. Think of this, and you will be ashamed. Thy brain is finite and childish. But the culture of your character and heart may be full and worthy of man, even if your intellectual knowledge is limited.

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There are two types of laziness: horizontal and vertical. There is the man who is lazy only in the long view of his life; in his plans; in postponing his resolutions, his decisions; in building up his life's work lazily, building everything into time, into the great distance. And then there is the other, vertical laziness when we remain lazy before the moment when we do not think, say or do what could be done at that moment. We don't reach out for something we could get, without much effort, and later perhaps only at great sacrifice, we don't pick up the phone, write that letter, or jot down that thought, right then, in that moment. It's the latter kind of laziness that is most dangerous. Life depends on such missed, lazily neglected moments.

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For most people, the compulsion to chatter is obvious in the law of life; they chatter while they live; till they live they chatter; they do not think, they chatter, and they have the impression that they exist. But in fact they are not in reality, in the way that the thinker is; they only babble; and the one who is babbling is not thinking. A man who thinks, when he can, is silent; and when he can no longer be silent, he speaks or writes. But this he does only as a last necessity. Nay, to the chatterbox, rapid speech, by which he conveys to the world all the jumbled information, the alkaline desire, the gross observation, the superficial perception, which his sense-organs convey to his consciousness, is a necessity of life. It might crack if it did not babble. It does not digest the matter of the world; it spits it out and vomits it up, as crudely as it has received it. There is no command, no threat to lock its tongue. It spits out the world, which then becomes unbearable: concepts disappear when the chatterbox speaks, and the world fills itself with words.

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But you also don't always have the right to remain silent; especially when the chatterer speaks, sooner or later you have to answer. Of course, nothing would be more attractive or comfortable than to be silent among people all the time, and to speak to the world only through your work - your work, which may be a book or a pair of decently sewn shoes, or even the fact of a patient and balanced existence. This would be the most beautiful thing, but life does not give the solution so cheaply. You have to listen, but not as one who is silent out of convenience or pride or contempt; you have no right to do so, because you are human, and your fellow human beings have a right to ask you for answers to their questions. No, you must listen as one who guards something. And indeed, he who listens responsibly always preserves something: a secret, a rank, the consciousness of human culture. But sometimes you must also speak, you must throw off the dark cloak of silence, you must step into the arena with a naked body, holding the just weapon of human combat, the truth. If the truth is denied, you have no right to remain silent.

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Don't be ashamed if you love animals. Don't be afraid if a dog is closer to your soul than most people you know personally. It is lying prophets and gross, wicked men who reproach you for this affection, saying, "Steal from men the feelings you lavish on the dog! Selfish, cold-hearted fellow!" - Never mind them. Love your dog, this bright-eyed, tireless friend, who asks nothing more for his friendship than a modest treat and a petting or two. Don't think that tenderness and selfishness make you love animals. They are our brothers and sisters, made in the same workshop as humans, and they have a mind, sometimes more complex and subtle than most humans. Others call animal love a weakness, and mock us for it - you just walk your dog. You will be in good company, and God knows this.

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Read with strength. Sometimes read with more power than the force of the writing you are reading was produced with. Read with reverence, passion, attention, and unrelenting. The writer may babble, but you read tersely. Listening to every word, one after another, back and forth in the book, seeing the clues that lead you into the thick of it, listening for the secret signs that the writer may have failed to detect as he moved forward in the mass of his work. Never to be read with a puffed-up, casual eye, as one invited to a divine feast, and only to rummage in the food with the tip of his fork. Read elegantly, generously. Read it as if you were reading the last book in the mortuary that the jailer put in your cell. Read for life and death, for that is the greatest, the human gift. Consider that only man reads.

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But we must also live with our hearts, with that other rhythm of life, which is more secret, more hidden, more difficult to know than the order of the world's flow. Those whose hearts beat eighty, at a willing pace, should not want to live like marathon runners. You must be constantly listening to the secret Morse code of your body and character, those subtle and powerful messages that determine the true measure of your life. He whose senses have been dulled by ambition, by passion, will hear these voices no more. Such a man lives against his body, his soul, and the pace of the world; he lives unworthily of man and is therefore punished in an inhuman way.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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Man, in his immense arrogance and vanity, is willing to believe that he can live against the laws of the world, that he can subvert them and rebel against them with impunity. It is as if a drop of water said, "I am not like the sea." Or the spark: "I will not be burned by fire." But man is nothing but a mere part of the world, as perishable as milk or bear meat, as everything that appears one moment on the world's great market and then, the next, is consigned to the garbage or the cesspool. Man, in his corporeal nature, is not even a high element in the world; rather, he is a miserable aggregate of materials doomed to perish. Stone, metal, too, lives longer than man. Therefore, all that we represent to the world through our bodies is insignificant. Only our souls are stronger and more permanent than stone and metal - so we must never see ourselves in any other way than in the volumes of our souls. The strength that expresses itself in the perishable bodily fabric is not only a part of the world, but a meaning. This force is the human soul. Everything else we represent and display in the world is ridiculous and pathetic.

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You must not live by superstitions. Friday, the thirteenth, bewitchment, the quackery explanation of numbers and signs, were brought to our world by the Gnostics, the flocking to early Christian Rome of the wacky and rambling sects, the Syrian and Alexandrian tricksters, the cross-eyed wordsmiths, the foaming at the mouth and the sneaky fans. Young Christendom has not yet had the power to beat those who beat you with their eyes, for Friday it says, 'A day'", for thirteen, 'A number like all the rest.'" It was a confusing and fermenting time. The Stoics were no longer in command in Rome, the Christians were not yet ruling. Man stood abandoned in the face of his nature and of nature itself. He was afraid, he was scarce, he was superstitious, he was magical. You're human, you have faith, you know there's order behind the phenomena, a higher intelligence. Reject the superstitions.

But know also that the proud consciousness of your intellect and faith does not discipline and intimidate the more secret forces of the world, which steal and prowl around you from birth to death. The accident, the interplay of numbers, the law of large numbers, the incomprehensible intentions and designs of earth, the air, and the rays, are all unseen. Some humility and trembling you may yet retain in your heart. The world is not only bright and dark, no; the world is also murky. There are not only rays and light and heat; there are demons. (Goethe believed in demons.) The world is not only sensible and consistent; somewhere in its phenomena lurks magic. You must not be superstitious, for it is not fit for man. But you must not despise superstition altogether, for it is superhuman, indecent pride. Rather, one should treat one's superstitions with only gentle mischief, as one who smiles - but is also a little afraid.

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More than anything else, it is important to align our work, our inclinations, and our pace of life with the great and eternal rhythm of nature. The course of the moon, the turn of the winds, the heat of the sun, the currents of the night, all these shape our personal destiny, our Tuesday or Wednesday life: one hears, from far away, the admonitions and warnings, the warning and reassuring sounds of the universe... One must live at the same time with the sun, the moon, the tides of the waters, the cold, and the heat: never against it, always in harmony with the world, in the whole order of creation and destruction. Only those who are somehow inwardly deaf to the sounds of the world stumble through life.

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If you can, always live to contemplate one of the masterpieces of the human spirit frozen in amber every day, even if only for a few moments! Let not a day go by without you reading a few lines from Seneca, Tolstoy, Cervantes, Aristotle, the Scriptures, Rilke, or Marcus Aurelius. Listen to a few beats of music every day, and if you have no other choice, play a theme by Bach, Beethoven, Gluck, or Mozart on your music box. Not a day should go by that you haven't spent a few minutes looking at a painting or drawing by Brueghel or Dürer or Michelangelo in the mirror of a good print. It is so easy to get all this, and so easy to find half an hour for fine art! And so easy to fill your soul with the happy harmony of human perfection! You are rich, however miserable you may be. The fullness of the human spirit is yours. Live it, every day, as man is breathing.