Quotes

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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.

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In parallel with knowing our spirit, we must also know the nature of our body. But only as the nature of a bad and unfaithful servant. Our spirit is master, our intellect commands; the body is but a servant. It must be treated, too, intelligently and fairly, impartially and rigorously, as a servant who is at all times prone to disloyalty, to flight and rebellion.

We must know his nature, and his inclinations, and, as far as possible, reconcile him to the world, to the possibilities, to the ebb and flow of the eternal rhythm of life. He is a servant and quite childlike. The inclinations of our minds are as primitive as the demands of a small child. The body wants everything, every pleasure, every satisfaction, and it wants it constantly. It must be treated with severity at such times. But the stuff of which it is made is akin to earth, water, and the stars: there is something eternal in the body, yet at the same time it is ridiculously perishable and fleeting. In the very short time that this servant is at our disposal, we must know his nature and quality, his secret needs, and with benevolence and experience give him all that he may need to do his work and not disturb our character and reason. But the character must not tolerate any slave rebellion.

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Are you anxious because your senses are being stimulated and disturbed by this beautiful young woman, and you fear that she is sharing her beauty and youth with others? But what did you expect from her? Some monastic vow, some grim fidelity? It is not because she is young and beautiful. Think what a great worry and concern for her, this fragile beauty and fleeting youth, this evil gift with which the Creator has blessed and smitten her - this beauty that changes, fades, grows fainter and more fragile with each passing day and moment? Can she think of other things, give her heart to other than her beauty and youth, and care for other things truly, wholly, according to her heart and interests? It is as if you wanted to capture a moment of bright morning light, or a kind of illumination of the sea, and wished the world to remain like this forever! Learn humility, rejoice in beauty, and expect nothing from it but what it can give. And seek the warmth of life elsewhere; beauty is a cold flame, and cannot be warmed by it.

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The man who, in armor and a manner befitting the rank of man, wishes to stand his ground in the cruel battle of life, does well if he educates himself not only to impartiality and unquestioning justice but to pride without fear, to contempt of all human treachery and danger, to a superior outlook on all human situations. By superiority I do not mean a timid indifference, but the coolness of a man of reason and character in the face of all the assaults of life. Human meanness, misery, the tangle of accidents and tragedies, the contingencies that lurk around us at every moment to overthrow what we have built up in ourselves or the world by the means of our art, to disturb the tranquillity of our souls, to contaminate the relative contentment of our lives, to rob us of what we have rightly acquired: all this cannot be looked at from above, with sufficient indifference, coldness, and superiority.

We have no right to remain cold and superior only when we see innocent people being abused and tortured. At such times, man, do not attempt, from the pinnacles of some outlook, philosophy, or attitude, to look on human misery with motionless coldness. In your case, remain distinguished, cold, callous, and haughty. In the affliction of others, feel, fervent, act - do not shrink from being a burden to the powerful, beg, bribe, if need be, do what you can to help. In the cause of others, you cannot be impartially and coldly wise, nor proud, nor arrogant. The pain and humiliation of the innocent oblige you to leave the cliffs of your rest. Then, only then, you have no right to remain lonely and proud. Remember this well.

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For five thousand years, for ten thousand years, human matter has not changed. Only the costumes have changed, the systems and conditions of coexistence haven't changed. What is human - the soul and character - has not changed. In the city of Ur, Babylon, the same people lived as in Budapest today: and in their souls, they perceived the world and responded to the world in exactly the same way. Only, without instruments, they were closer to the secrets of the world, to time, to the stars, to the sign language of nature. Their hearing was more subtle, their vision - even without binoculars - sharper, more perceptive, more intuitive, more gripping. The human substance has not changed, but man is - thanks to a few geniuses and instruments - more blind and deaf in civilization than he was at the beginning of human times. Duller and dumber. More intelligent and at the same time more ignorant. He thinks he controls the universe with the push of a button. This vast structure, civilization, has banished man from the great, secret, intimate community of the world.

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At the bottom of things is sex. Maybe even in the lives of crystals. But all sexuality is sad.

Look at the business of bodies as a judgment. Only tenderness is human. Passion is inhuman and hopeless.

But the judgment that condemns all living to passion is merciless. Between desire and gratification, the living world is built, with a will as inhuman as the Pharaohs built the pyramids with naked masses.

What do you hope for, poor naked slave, when the sharp whip of lust cracks on your back?

Happiness? Satisfaction?

You build the world's edifice, with the binder of your blood and semen, you do force labor. Only delicacy and tenderness can momentarily forget the sad constraint of the cruel bondage of sex.

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Every person God appoints to a role is lonely. Jesus spoke down from the cross to his mother as one who rejects all human compassion. This is the most fearful word in Scripture. And Jesus said that whoever follows him will abandon his family, abandon everyone. The man appointed to the role never demands less of himself and his followers. One cannot redeem the world and still be the best husband, son, and father, with four children, a spouse, a canary, and a retirement allowance. The role always demands total solitude, desolate solitude, and ruthless, almost inhuman behavior. Every man who undertakes the cause of men is forced to assume this loneliness and inhumanity. Anyone who does not take it on is a swindler; even if he is crucified.

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Every age, every stage of life, yes, every day, has its moments of crisis, when everything you have tolerated: your work, your environment, your shortcomings, your desires, your nature - suddenly, without a transition, becomes unbearable. This crisis is as powerful as an explosion. You lean over your work and feel at once the imperfection of the task you have done, the intolerable hopelessness of the scale and demands of the tasks awaiting you. You bend over your life and, like a man drowning, you see all that you have been cowardly, lazy, dishonest or selfish to do, condensed in a single moment, and which now threatens to flood and drown.

This crisis, these tens of minutes, these life- and work-threatening moments, return with increasing intensity as time passes. It happens daily. At such times, know that crises are time-bound; watch your heart and the hands of your watch. As one who has a seizure, and knows that seizures have a rhythm and a time. Give up your work for a short time, relax the order of your days, and strive to be careless and humble. The ten minutes will pass. Work and life, as long as they are connected, will remain.

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When you are hit by a great shock or emotional pain, first of all remember that it is natural, because you are human. What were you thinking? You are a human being, so your loved ones die, your friends leave you, and everything you have gathered and loved flies away like dust in a windstorm. It is not wonderful, it is the order of nature, it is simple and natural. Rather, what's miraculous is that you don't get hit by great misfortune every day. You are human, therefore you must suffer; and your suffering does not last forever, because you are human. Adjust your conduct in sorrow and adversity to this truth. Never show sorrow to the world. Show neither pride nor haughtiness. Do not deny pain to yourself, but know that pain and adversity are always a downfall. People think: "Someone important to him, someone he loved, has died; well, he has fallen." Feel the pain, but don't hiss. On the one hand, when you sigh, when you shed a tear, you are already cheating a little in these moments. The real pain is silent; tears and cries are a relief. So do not deceive yourself, nor make the world glad. Be silent. Control thy face and thy movements. And if thou art alone with thy grief, speak thus: "Here, pain. But however much pain I will feel, I know it is all right: because I am human."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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The French say that only those who can see reality have a real imagination. This ability is rare. People believe that fantasy is clear by dreaming up some never-existent phenomenon. But never-before-existed fairies have no hands or feet, they are like griffins, and anything that has nothing to do with reality is boring and childish. True imagination builds the new, the wonderful, the surprising from reality. To see reality is a far more surprising and imaginative enterprise than to build dream castles out of clouds that crumble at the first whiff of reality. Learn to really see a sane man, and you will find that he is more surprising and wonderful than the winged heroes of myth.