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Principles and Precepts of the Return to the Obvious
English, French (translation)
157 pages, Hardcover
First published May 5, 1988
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25 people want to read
About the author
Lanza del Vasto
51 books7 followersGiuseppe Giovanni Lanza del Vasto è stato un filosofo, poeta e scrittore italiano. La sua personalità eccezionale riunisce caratteristiche disparate: poeta, scrittore, filosofo, pensatore religioso con una forte vena mistica, ma anche patriarca fondatore di comunità rurali sul modello di quelle gandhiane e attivista nonviolento contro la guerra d'Algeria o gli armamenti nucleari.
Source: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanza_de...
Source: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanza_de...
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 20, 2015
This book is a set of maxims about a return to the self. The narrator chooses to wander away from cities and from the consuming daily life in order to find a deeper meaning of life. The fact that he takes a distance vis-à-vis a busy life helps him detect how it exhausts one's inner peace and strength.
But the more he stays away from other human beings the weaker he becomes. After all we are social beings and even though we find many faults with being with others, we still need to keep them nearby.
There are many lines I liked in this book. Here are a few:
Tu as trop de vie, grande ville.
Trop de vie s'appelle fièvre.
Fièvre est signe de maladie.
Ta maladie s'est de n'avoir pas de raison d'être.
Tu sais que tu es: c'est l'évidence première.
Mais savoir ce que tu es est un savoir que tout savoir ignore.
Ne répète pas: Je pense, donc je suis.
Demande-toi: suis-je moi-même?
But the more he stays away from other human beings the weaker he becomes. After all we are social beings and even though we find many faults with being with others, we still need to keep them nearby.
There are many lines I liked in this book. Here are a few:
Tu as trop de vie, grande ville.
Trop de vie s'appelle fièvre.
Fièvre est signe de maladie.
Ta maladie s'est de n'avoir pas de raison d'être.
Tu sais que tu es: c'est l'évidence première.
Mais savoir ce que tu es est un savoir que tout savoir ignore.
Ne répète pas: Je pense, donc je suis.
Demande-toi: suis-je moi-même?
Read
December 28, 2024Lanza del Vasto (1901–1981) wrote this in 1937. I read the English translation published in 1974.
I'm envious of this book title. Of course he ought to have ditched "principles and precepts" and just gone with RETURN TO THE OBVIOUS. If you handed out a pamphlet with the title RETURN TO THE OBVIOUS, everyone would read it, especially if you decorated it with happy cartoon space aliens.
Midway through, I took a break to watch the Malindaz Challenge episode of "Evil" (Season 1, Episode 10), which made me think about subliminal messages. I comp RETURN TO THE OBVIOUS to Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet plus a funky subliminal message you can only hear if you know OBVIOUS things.
Examples:
I'm envious of this book title. Of course he ought to have ditched "principles and precepts" and just gone with RETURN TO THE OBVIOUS. If you handed out a pamphlet with the title RETURN TO THE OBVIOUS, everyone would read it, especially if you decorated it with happy cartoon space aliens.
Midway through, I took a break to watch the Malindaz Challenge episode of "Evil" (Season 1, Episode 10), which made me think about subliminal messages. I comp RETURN TO THE OBVIOUS to Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet plus a funky subliminal message you can only hear if you know OBVIOUS things.
Examples:
#6
“Every thought stops and defines itself, answering yes to Yes and no to No.
But life answers yes to No as well as to Yes.”
#31
“The bourgeois is accused of being a fierce wild beast. It is highly unfair.
The blood he is accused of drinking, he has no doubt drunk. But there’s nothing of the lion about him. He is more like a million bugs.”
#33
“Where is your beauty, big city, gray and tangled like pubic hair?”
#39
“They are all fleeing in terror of Not Enough.”
#47
“Some confess to being utterly exquisite, they have tooth-brush moustaches, bow-ties and walking-sticks, whence comes their importance.
And they do nothing else, day and night, but be viscounts.”
#63
“Cut your trousers out of blue linen or reddish hemp.
Let the thread and the stitches in the seams be its decoration, and later, the color of the scraps you will have to patch it with.
Get rid of the indecent fly and comical suspenders.
Let a single button fasten your trousers on your hip-bone—a button of good boxwood, well carved.”
#114
“Do not despise your half of shadow.
Do not think it nothing because you see nothing there. Do not think it serves no purpose because you do no work there. Do not think: I do not think there, so I am not there.”
#155
“If God were no one, no one would be anyone.”
#183
“Being Carried Away (whether you get drunk on wine, anger, revenge, love, games, entertainment, eloquence, glory, panic terror, sacred horror, conquest, revolt or civic virtue) falls back on itself and into the void.”
#213
“Write little.
Before the perfect beauty of branches, shade, cloud and water, the pen hesitates, stricken with modesty.”
#222
“Art is love of oneself taken to its purest extreme.
Whoever seeks to please others by his art lies to them and betrays himself.”
#226
“Whoever holds the egg of the obvious has only to open his hand to show it.”
#250
“Mystery is the obviousness of the unknown.”
#274
“…every day, do a good deed. …even if only toward the dog prowling beneath the walls on the heap of filth; even if only toward the toad with the squashed leg.”
#324
“Every day, read a page of the gospel again.
You will see that there is nothing new to be said concerning the obvious.”
November 6, 2018
Uma espécie de "Auden" em versão mais compacta e poética :)
"A verdade que tu procuras não está no fim da estrada. Ela está por toda a parte, ela está em ti. É tu mesmo que tu procuras, ó louco, e andas a procurar-te ao longe."
"A verdade que tu procuras não está no fim da estrada. Ela está por toda a parte, ela está em ti. É tu mesmo que tu procuras, ó louco, e andas a procurar-te ao longe."
December 28, 2014
Great words from a saint.
8
Teach your body to die walking
Teach it, step by step, the nature of everything, which is to pass
Let every desirable thing say to your eyes:
“I don’t belong to you; you don’t belong to me.”
10
Since your body cannot follow you into steadfastness, keep it constantly on the move so as to put its anxiety off the track.
All day long keep it walking or working; stop it only for sleep. If for one single moment you cease to busy your body, it will busy you.
16
At least never be one of those misers for whom honesty is an economy of gratitude.
If you don’t know how to ask when you are in need, your dignity has shaky foundations.
If you don’t know how to receive and give thanks, you will forever remain in debt.
What can you give back to your mother in exchange for her blood, her milk, and her tears?
In exchange for the light and your soul, what are you going to give back to God?
17
If you close your hand, the world will remain closed to you like a fist.
If you want the world to open up to you, open your hand first.
18
Never forget that generosity is a privilege.
Those who receive from your hand know it, have no doubt.
If, therefore, you give immodestly, their ingratitude will be well deserved.
25
Those who consent to give up the moments of their brief and precious lives to acquire this conventional sign of possible pleasure are dupes of abstraction and live in unreality.
26
Endeavor to do what nobody but you can do.
Endeavor to want what everybody else can have as well.
Distinguish yourself by what you are, not by what you have.
27
Many are those who seek rare and precious things, but rare and precious is the taste of rough and common things.
35
You have too much life in you, big city.
Too much life is called fever.
Fever is a sign of sickness.
Your sickness is having no reason for being.
36
What do they produce?
Speed.
A form of nothingness.
37
Trifles and abuses are the great business of these busy men, unsmiling and serious as monkeys.
68
If you pray to ask, do not ask to receive, ask to purify desire.
Pray God rather to purify you of all desire.
Yes, do not pray in order to ask, but pray to give thanks and sing glory.
Pray to take part in the growth of the trees, in the leaves in the wind, in the birds in the light, in the work of the illustrious planets, in the ecstasy of the stars forever established in truth.
69
Of the future you have one certainty, one only: you will die.
This is not misfortune like ignorance or sin, but a grace sent by the Lord in the guise of chastisement.
Which gives its price to our every moment and concludes our figure.
73
Play at giving, there is no more entertaining game. Give yourself, spend yourself, go think, sing, and act as one does when one sings.
When the ungrateful heir, Death, comes to claim his due, let him find empty coffers, leftovers from a feast, and the house forsaken.
74
Death is an absurdity: what is cannot cease to be. But we shall die, for this life is not our being, but our lack of it.
79
If you don’t want to fall prey to suffering, go and meet it.
If you flee it, you are lost, for it runs faster than you.
80
The only suffering is suffering undergone.
The suffering a man imposes on himself, to train and try his powers, thereby loses its horror and its venom.
The man who can impose suffering on himself can impose limits on it, take possession of it and break free.
The man who, by the grace of love, assumes the suffering of others, abolishes all suffering of his own, wipes out his sins and establishes in grave and lasting joy the heart he has worked upon.
81
Are you going to turn your head and peck at every desire like a hen running after flies?
82
Desire is like a beggar: you give him generous alms to make him go away, but the more you give him, the more often he returns and knocks at the back door.
85
Ifyou do not take this road rejoicing, your heart full of desire and hope, know that you are not made for it and go and dabble elsewhere.
Yes, perfume your head when you fast, and if you suffer, consider your suffering a gift of God and if you weep, remember that blessed are they that mourn, and be happy with a difficult happiness.
Austerity is Le Gai Savoir. Practice on yourself like a musician on his instrument. When you can play, you will draw from the strings pure, continuous music entitled Perfect Joy.
And you will no longer be of those who anxiously ask whether there is a reward in another world for the righteous.
96
On Fridays you shall fast.
Fasting does not mean eating one thing rather than another, but means not eating.
As often as you must gather strength against invasion from outside, you shall multiply your fasts and prolong them.
You may drink water, for as everybody knows, happiness is living on love and fresh water.
104
Prayer for Friday:
Lord, be my bread today,
the spring of my strength,
my hunger, my thirst, my desire, my joy.
Keep me from the loves that are not
love of Thee.
Deliver me from my nature, Lord,
and take my place in me.
105
Confirm fasting by silence. Speak to no one on such days. If you are spoken to, answer by gesture, or if necessity forces you, in writing.
No one can know the profit he will draw from this practice without having tried it, this the softest of all austere exercises, soft to the spirit as wool to the body, wool that makes for it a nest of its own warmth.
106
The softest but the most effective.
Your face closed and your mouth sealed, you will walk like your own statue, O chaste one!
You will feel a wall rise up around you, and foundations under your feet.
Through the loopholes of your eyes, you will see men approach then dissolve into air because of the vanity of their loud voices and their gestures.
Lowering your eyelids and going down into yourself, you will gauge your inner majesty.
118
If you fall ill, treat the illness by showers and sweating: give it a jolt, lest being at ease, it stay with you.
But if a fever gets the better of you and your legs give way, look for a dry corner and lie down out of the way.
Fast, drink water and wait. Help your illness to pass by not thinking of it.
There is only one cure for all diseases: patience.
If your time has come, die with good grace.
Nothing is more vain than to want to put off the hour that will come all the same.
And nothing is more vulgar than to insist.
123
Love and respect your body. Treat it like a stranger, like a friend, like an enemy, like your neighbor’s wife.
124
Habeas corpus: possess your body and know it.
It is a thing that comes to you from outside, a thing among the other things, still immersed like a plumb line in outerness.
Among the other things, it is the only one you feel from the outside and from the inside at the same time. It is therefore the only key that can let you into the meaning of all the rest.
All created things have their echo in your body as the sound of the sea echoes in the conch.
153
The eye that sees all does not see its own look.
None has seen God.
For in every eye, it is God who sees.
162
In paths no man has trodden, risk your steps.
In thought no man has thought, risk your head.
163
Have regard for others.
Have regard for the opinions of others.
Have no regard for the opinions others have of you.
165
Reason can prove its own truth concerning anything at all, but action alone can link truth to the nonsense of reality.
179
Hindrance, Being Carried Away and Enchainment are the 3 orders of inner enslavement.
Man falls ceaselessly from one order of enslavement into another. As a result, in the conduct of his life, there are halts, leaps, sudden unforeseeable changes of direction and the uncertainty he takes for free will.
181
If you want to escape from Hindrance, do not try to augment your power in proportion to the covetousness of pride and ambition, for Hindrance will augment in like measure.
Reduce your desires to your needs, your ambition to surpassing yourself and your pride to considering the dignity of your essence.
184
Become capable.
Capable: * that which contains. Capable: whoever possesses a content.
Contain, contain, contain your anger, your seed and your breath.
188
The mental form of Hindrance is blindness and ignorance.
The mental form of Being Carried Away is inattention, sister to inexistence.
Or else it is imagination: the kind that fills our heads with bubbles and din and robs us of everything, even our very selves.
Or it may be reaction: the act that has its cause outside me.
The mental form of Enchainment isi the stupid logic of routine that does not make us do things because they seem sensible, but makes things seem sensible because we do them.
Mental Enchainment is what hoists the technical genius of human beings on to the same level of perfection as the work of insects eating away the beam they live in.
The periodical catastrophes named war and ruin are likewise its doing.
And each of us gladly plays his part in the manufacture of the catastrophe, for motives of interest, duty and love of popularity.
192
Deliverance of the head is wisdom.
Deliverance of the heart is love.
Deliverance of the senses is beauty.
Deliverance of the act is the rite.
193
The Rite is the act of Presence.
The Rite is the Representation and the Present. Representation because it recalls, reproduces, produces the presence of God among men. The Present because it presents the offering, makes it valid, because it obliges the offerer to pay attention and collect himself, that is to say, obliges him to be present.
The Rite delivers from Hindrance. It keeps a man away from objects of appetite and subjects of pride, turns desire into prayer and giving, makes pride bow down, strikes at the roots of Hindrance.
The Rite delivers us from the Being Carried Away in which we empty ourselves in words and gestures. On the contrary, it leads a man to fill with himself the words and gestures of the Rite…
Of Beauty
206
Sing.
Above all when walking in the plain, to give rhythm to your steps.
Sing in long draughts as you drink from a spring when you are thirsty.
Forget the tunes you know. Extricate yourself from teh sticky trap of songs you have learnt. Let your voice flow according to its own law and the inclination of the moment.
Search in the substance of your own voice for plenitude of form and the happy ornament.
Mold your modulation on the gently rounded line of the hills wedded by distance to the substance of the sky.
Sing lest you grow old. Sing to defy time that passes, escapes and destroys us. Rebel against time, fly over it, take revenge on time with a song.
Music changes time into a plaint and the plaint into a pleasure.
Why, O heart, do you grieve in the song?
I grieve when I sing a lament for the death of all things.
I grieve for the red of the roses that will turn brown tonight.
I grieve for the happy faces with quick, shy eyelashes and moist lips, of whom nothing will survive but the skeleton’s grin. I grieve for girls in love whose flesh is snow and lilac. I mourn for the bells of my village. The great country we crossed when I was a child and will never see again. I mourn for the house that rang with children’s voices and clear laughter and homely sounds. The window that opened to the hope of morning, and the sweetness of lamp-lit evenings by the fireside…
255
Life sleeps in the depths of our flesh.
Love is the moment when life passes from one body into another.
Life is laid bare; life is wide open during that flash.
Love is evidence of life.
258
Sleep calls the living creature back inside. Hunger drives him outward. Love addresses him to the inside of the outer form.
259
Sleep creates, recreates, that is to say, creates anew, makes and unmakes life from within. Hunger kills the life of the other who is outside in order to take his outside. Love creates a life by means of the other who outside: it procreates. Why must God create? Because He is love.
279
Knowledge without wisdom is a deadly danger. Beauty without love is a deadly poison. Power without justice is a gulf of blood. Asceticism without charity is a desert of pride.
281
Love is the passion that burns and destroys everything: the action that creates and saves everything.
282
A drop of good in an ocean of baseness redeems the whole...
284
Attachment, lust and passion: such is the sorry trinity of stagnant love.
291
If you dislike war, respect your neighbor.
And cherish the man who comes from afar.
Venerate the distance in him.
Distance is like an allusion to the infinite.
Love the man in your neighbor.
Love God in the man who comes from afar.
295
There is a kind of lust that shies away in horror from everything love seeks, and wants only ugly, dirty, vulgar, adulterated objects.
There is a kind of lust that hunts for innocence and beauty in order to debase them, drag them in the mud and leave them there.
296
Lust contaminates its object.
The lecher does not like his object to return to him, bringing back with it his own smell.
He repulses it as the mouth loathes what it has vomited.
Which is the reason why certain lechers love virgins.
And would like a new one every night.
307
Love, love. Bristle at the indecency of the word.
Don’t speak of love all the time, don’t discuss it in a competent tone of voice. Beware of letting yourself go in sublime poetic speeches on the subject of love, lest you rush into indecency.
Know that you don’t know how to love, and at least remain modest.
How could you love someone else when you don’t know how to love yourself?
How could you love yourself when you have never met or seen yourself? When you are unable to look steadily at yourself and the nakedness of your essence even for five minutes?
You don’t know how to love. For in order to give, one must have. What have you to give, but your own disorder and emptiness?
You don’t know how to love, you only know how to run away through other people. You only know how to flow according to your own inclination, to slide into pleasure, to unroll the chain of accustomed and mechanical gestures.
Give up your trifling and your slobbering kisses.
Learn how to love, not because your incontinent heart is overflowing, but to obey God’s commandment.
Learn the virile charity that has severe words for those who flatter you, serene for those who fight you, warm for the weary, strong for the suffering, clear for the blind, measured for the proud, and a bucketful of water and a stick for the sleepers.
If love pleads and weeps -- kill it; if it embraces and forces -- kill it. Learn the love that hopes for nothing from the world, but shines by its own virtue, the love that inspires the beloved with strength and leads him to deliverance.
Prune your heart -- your heart twisted like an old vine with revolt, aversion, anger and disgust, cut it clean and stick the graft into the wound.
Turn away from the whole world to care for it alone, the small shoot scarcely turned green.
It needs all your vigor in order to grow green; all the warmth of your care, all the light of your attention.
When the tree has grown green, it gives itself entirely in its fruit.
315
Returning evil for evil is not undoing evil but redoubling it.
When they hear shouts of “Fire!” men of goodwill rush up with torches.
But it is water and salt we need.
316
The ferret caught in the trap pushes against the door and the more it pushes, the tighter the door shuts. Pulling toward oneself is the trick of intelligence. If, instead of pushing against evil, man drew it toward him, he would perhaps escape from the trap of evil.
320
You love the sea although it is only a desert, indifferent in calm, threatening in the gale, where the wind sows and reaps the surf, and although it has nothing to give you other than cold, bitterness and death.
And you love it because it turns the multiplied face of heaven.
Love men thus, my friend, and expect nothing more of them, and nothing else.
321
O madman walking in the night, raise your head, stop, look heaven in the eyes and question it.
What is it that preserves the admirable edifice of the world?
This: that each star is a globe of fire turning on its own axis. The just precision of all, safeguards each star from rushing upon another and maintains each in its burning chastity.
Each because of its density attracts all others. Each because of its fixity upholds all others. Each because it radiates reaches all others and communicates its presence to them.
Learn from the stars how to love.
Written between Rome and Bari, on the road; taken up again and finished between jungle and glacier on the Himalaya this Christmas Eve 1937.
8
Teach your body to die walking
Teach it, step by step, the nature of everything, which is to pass
Let every desirable thing say to your eyes:
“I don’t belong to you; you don’t belong to me.”
10
Since your body cannot follow you into steadfastness, keep it constantly on the move so as to put its anxiety off the track.
All day long keep it walking or working; stop it only for sleep. If for one single moment you cease to busy your body, it will busy you.
16
At least never be one of those misers for whom honesty is an economy of gratitude.
If you don’t know how to ask when you are in need, your dignity has shaky foundations.
If you don’t know how to receive and give thanks, you will forever remain in debt.
What can you give back to your mother in exchange for her blood, her milk, and her tears?
In exchange for the light and your soul, what are you going to give back to God?
17
If you close your hand, the world will remain closed to you like a fist.
If you want the world to open up to you, open your hand first.
18
Never forget that generosity is a privilege.
Those who receive from your hand know it, have no doubt.
If, therefore, you give immodestly, their ingratitude will be well deserved.
25
Those who consent to give up the moments of their brief and precious lives to acquire this conventional sign of possible pleasure are dupes of abstraction and live in unreality.
26
Endeavor to do what nobody but you can do.
Endeavor to want what everybody else can have as well.
Distinguish yourself by what you are, not by what you have.
27
Many are those who seek rare and precious things, but rare and precious is the taste of rough and common things.
35
You have too much life in you, big city.
Too much life is called fever.
Fever is a sign of sickness.
Your sickness is having no reason for being.
36
What do they produce?
Speed.
A form of nothingness.
37
Trifles and abuses are the great business of these busy men, unsmiling and serious as monkeys.
68
If you pray to ask, do not ask to receive, ask to purify desire.
Pray God rather to purify you of all desire.
Yes, do not pray in order to ask, but pray to give thanks and sing glory.
Pray to take part in the growth of the trees, in the leaves in the wind, in the birds in the light, in the work of the illustrious planets, in the ecstasy of the stars forever established in truth.
69
Of the future you have one certainty, one only: you will die.
This is not misfortune like ignorance or sin, but a grace sent by the Lord in the guise of chastisement.
Which gives its price to our every moment and concludes our figure.
73
Play at giving, there is no more entertaining game. Give yourself, spend yourself, go think, sing, and act as one does when one sings.
When the ungrateful heir, Death, comes to claim his due, let him find empty coffers, leftovers from a feast, and the house forsaken.
74
Death is an absurdity: what is cannot cease to be. But we shall die, for this life is not our being, but our lack of it.
79
If you don’t want to fall prey to suffering, go and meet it.
If you flee it, you are lost, for it runs faster than you.
80
The only suffering is suffering undergone.
The suffering a man imposes on himself, to train and try his powers, thereby loses its horror and its venom.
The man who can impose suffering on himself can impose limits on it, take possession of it and break free.
The man who, by the grace of love, assumes the suffering of others, abolishes all suffering of his own, wipes out his sins and establishes in grave and lasting joy the heart he has worked upon.
81
Are you going to turn your head and peck at every desire like a hen running after flies?
82
Desire is like a beggar: you give him generous alms to make him go away, but the more you give him, the more often he returns and knocks at the back door.
85
Ifyou do not take this road rejoicing, your heart full of desire and hope, know that you are not made for it and go and dabble elsewhere.
Yes, perfume your head when you fast, and if you suffer, consider your suffering a gift of God and if you weep, remember that blessed are they that mourn, and be happy with a difficult happiness.
Austerity is Le Gai Savoir. Practice on yourself like a musician on his instrument. When you can play, you will draw from the strings pure, continuous music entitled Perfect Joy.
And you will no longer be of those who anxiously ask whether there is a reward in another world for the righteous.
96
On Fridays you shall fast.
Fasting does not mean eating one thing rather than another, but means not eating.
As often as you must gather strength against invasion from outside, you shall multiply your fasts and prolong them.
You may drink water, for as everybody knows, happiness is living on love and fresh water.
104
Prayer for Friday:
Lord, be my bread today,
the spring of my strength,
my hunger, my thirst, my desire, my joy.
Keep me from the loves that are not
love of Thee.
Deliver me from my nature, Lord,
and take my place in me.
105
Confirm fasting by silence. Speak to no one on such days. If you are spoken to, answer by gesture, or if necessity forces you, in writing.
No one can know the profit he will draw from this practice without having tried it, this the softest of all austere exercises, soft to the spirit as wool to the body, wool that makes for it a nest of its own warmth.
106
The softest but the most effective.
Your face closed and your mouth sealed, you will walk like your own statue, O chaste one!
You will feel a wall rise up around you, and foundations under your feet.
Through the loopholes of your eyes, you will see men approach then dissolve into air because of the vanity of their loud voices and their gestures.
Lowering your eyelids and going down into yourself, you will gauge your inner majesty.
118
If you fall ill, treat the illness by showers and sweating: give it a jolt, lest being at ease, it stay with you.
But if a fever gets the better of you and your legs give way, look for a dry corner and lie down out of the way.
Fast, drink water and wait. Help your illness to pass by not thinking of it.
There is only one cure for all diseases: patience.
If your time has come, die with good grace.
Nothing is more vain than to want to put off the hour that will come all the same.
And nothing is more vulgar than to insist.
123
Love and respect your body. Treat it like a stranger, like a friend, like an enemy, like your neighbor’s wife.
124
Habeas corpus: possess your body and know it.
It is a thing that comes to you from outside, a thing among the other things, still immersed like a plumb line in outerness.
Among the other things, it is the only one you feel from the outside and from the inside at the same time. It is therefore the only key that can let you into the meaning of all the rest.
All created things have their echo in your body as the sound of the sea echoes in the conch.
153
The eye that sees all does not see its own look.
None has seen God.
For in every eye, it is God who sees.
162
In paths no man has trodden, risk your steps.
In thought no man has thought, risk your head.
163
Have regard for others.
Have regard for the opinions of others.
Have no regard for the opinions others have of you.
165
Reason can prove its own truth concerning anything at all, but action alone can link truth to the nonsense of reality.
179
Hindrance, Being Carried Away and Enchainment are the 3 orders of inner enslavement.
Man falls ceaselessly from one order of enslavement into another. As a result, in the conduct of his life, there are halts, leaps, sudden unforeseeable changes of direction and the uncertainty he takes for free will.
181
If you want to escape from Hindrance, do not try to augment your power in proportion to the covetousness of pride and ambition, for Hindrance will augment in like measure.
Reduce your desires to your needs, your ambition to surpassing yourself and your pride to considering the dignity of your essence.
184
Become capable.
Capable: * that which contains. Capable: whoever possesses a content.
Contain, contain, contain your anger, your seed and your breath.
188
The mental form of Hindrance is blindness and ignorance.
The mental form of Being Carried Away is inattention, sister to inexistence.
Or else it is imagination: the kind that fills our heads with bubbles and din and robs us of everything, even our very selves.
Or it may be reaction: the act that has its cause outside me.
The mental form of Enchainment isi the stupid logic of routine that does not make us do things because they seem sensible, but makes things seem sensible because we do them.
Mental Enchainment is what hoists the technical genius of human beings on to the same level of perfection as the work of insects eating away the beam they live in.
The periodical catastrophes named war and ruin are likewise its doing.
And each of us gladly plays his part in the manufacture of the catastrophe, for motives of interest, duty and love of popularity.
192
Deliverance of the head is wisdom.
Deliverance of the heart is love.
Deliverance of the senses is beauty.
Deliverance of the act is the rite.
193
The Rite is the act of Presence.
The Rite is the Representation and the Present. Representation because it recalls, reproduces, produces the presence of God among men. The Present because it presents the offering, makes it valid, because it obliges the offerer to pay attention and collect himself, that is to say, obliges him to be present.
The Rite delivers from Hindrance. It keeps a man away from objects of appetite and subjects of pride, turns desire into prayer and giving, makes pride bow down, strikes at the roots of Hindrance.
The Rite delivers us from the Being Carried Away in which we empty ourselves in words and gestures. On the contrary, it leads a man to fill with himself the words and gestures of the Rite…
Of Beauty
206
Sing.
Above all when walking in the plain, to give rhythm to your steps.
Sing in long draughts as you drink from a spring when you are thirsty.
Forget the tunes you know. Extricate yourself from teh sticky trap of songs you have learnt. Let your voice flow according to its own law and the inclination of the moment.
Search in the substance of your own voice for plenitude of form and the happy ornament.
Mold your modulation on the gently rounded line of the hills wedded by distance to the substance of the sky.
Sing lest you grow old. Sing to defy time that passes, escapes and destroys us. Rebel against time, fly over it, take revenge on time with a song.
Music changes time into a plaint and the plaint into a pleasure.
Why, O heart, do you grieve in the song?
I grieve when I sing a lament for the death of all things.
I grieve for the red of the roses that will turn brown tonight.
I grieve for the happy faces with quick, shy eyelashes and moist lips, of whom nothing will survive but the skeleton’s grin. I grieve for girls in love whose flesh is snow and lilac. I mourn for the bells of my village. The great country we crossed when I was a child and will never see again. I mourn for the house that rang with children’s voices and clear laughter and homely sounds. The window that opened to the hope of morning, and the sweetness of lamp-lit evenings by the fireside…
255
Life sleeps in the depths of our flesh.
Love is the moment when life passes from one body into another.
Life is laid bare; life is wide open during that flash.
Love is evidence of life.
258
Sleep calls the living creature back inside. Hunger drives him outward. Love addresses him to the inside of the outer form.
259
Sleep creates, recreates, that is to say, creates anew, makes and unmakes life from within. Hunger kills the life of the other who is outside in order to take his outside. Love creates a life by means of the other who outside: it procreates. Why must God create? Because He is love.
279
Knowledge without wisdom is a deadly danger. Beauty without love is a deadly poison. Power without justice is a gulf of blood. Asceticism without charity is a desert of pride.
281
Love is the passion that burns and destroys everything: the action that creates and saves everything.
282
A drop of good in an ocean of baseness redeems the whole...
284
Attachment, lust and passion: such is the sorry trinity of stagnant love.
291
If you dislike war, respect your neighbor.
And cherish the man who comes from afar.
Venerate the distance in him.
Distance is like an allusion to the infinite.
Love the man in your neighbor.
Love God in the man who comes from afar.
295
There is a kind of lust that shies away in horror from everything love seeks, and wants only ugly, dirty, vulgar, adulterated objects.
There is a kind of lust that hunts for innocence and beauty in order to debase them, drag them in the mud and leave them there.
296
Lust contaminates its object.
The lecher does not like his object to return to him, bringing back with it his own smell.
He repulses it as the mouth loathes what it has vomited.
Which is the reason why certain lechers love virgins.
And would like a new one every night.
307
Love, love. Bristle at the indecency of the word.
Don’t speak of love all the time, don’t discuss it in a competent tone of voice. Beware of letting yourself go in sublime poetic speeches on the subject of love, lest you rush into indecency.
Know that you don’t know how to love, and at least remain modest.
How could you love someone else when you don’t know how to love yourself?
How could you love yourself when you have never met or seen yourself? When you are unable to look steadily at yourself and the nakedness of your essence even for five minutes?
You don’t know how to love. For in order to give, one must have. What have you to give, but your own disorder and emptiness?
You don’t know how to love, you only know how to run away through other people. You only know how to flow according to your own inclination, to slide into pleasure, to unroll the chain of accustomed and mechanical gestures.
Give up your trifling and your slobbering kisses.
Learn how to love, not because your incontinent heart is overflowing, but to obey God’s commandment.
Learn the virile charity that has severe words for those who flatter you, serene for those who fight you, warm for the weary, strong for the suffering, clear for the blind, measured for the proud, and a bucketful of water and a stick for the sleepers.
If love pleads and weeps -- kill it; if it embraces and forces -- kill it. Learn the love that hopes for nothing from the world, but shines by its own virtue, the love that inspires the beloved with strength and leads him to deliverance.
Prune your heart -- your heart twisted like an old vine with revolt, aversion, anger and disgust, cut it clean and stick the graft into the wound.
Turn away from the whole world to care for it alone, the small shoot scarcely turned green.
It needs all your vigor in order to grow green; all the warmth of your care, all the light of your attention.
When the tree has grown green, it gives itself entirely in its fruit.
315
Returning evil for evil is not undoing evil but redoubling it.
When they hear shouts of “Fire!” men of goodwill rush up with torches.
But it is water and salt we need.
316
The ferret caught in the trap pushes against the door and the more it pushes, the tighter the door shuts. Pulling toward oneself is the trick of intelligence. If, instead of pushing against evil, man drew it toward him, he would perhaps escape from the trap of evil.
320
You love the sea although it is only a desert, indifferent in calm, threatening in the gale, where the wind sows and reaps the surf, and although it has nothing to give you other than cold, bitterness and death.
And you love it because it turns the multiplied face of heaven.
Love men thus, my friend, and expect nothing more of them, and nothing else.
321
O madman walking in the night, raise your head, stop, look heaven in the eyes and question it.
What is it that preserves the admirable edifice of the world?
This: that each star is a globe of fire turning on its own axis. The just precision of all, safeguards each star from rushing upon another and maintains each in its burning chastity.
Each because of its density attracts all others. Each because of its fixity upholds all others. Each because it radiates reaches all others and communicates its presence to them.
Learn from the stars how to love.
Written between Rome and Bari, on the road; taken up again and finished between jungle and glacier on the Himalaya this Christmas Eve 1937.
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