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“With so excellent an heart, what pity that
He possesses so little solidity of judgment!”

I have experienced on my body and on my soul that I needed sin very much, I needed lust, the desire for possessions, vanity, and needed the most shameful despair, in order to learn how to give up all resistance, in order to learn how to love the world, in order to stop comparing it to some world I wished, I imagined, some kind of perfection I had made up, but to leave it as it is and to enjoy being a part of it.

“Siddhartha's previous births were no past, and his death and his return to Brahma was no future.
Nothing was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has existence and is present."

“Most people, Kamala, are like a falling leaf, which is blown and is turning around through the air, and wavers, and tumbles to the ground. But others, a few, are like stars, they go on a fixed course, no wind reaches them, in themselves they have their law and their course.”

“I’ve been training especially to be able to live in the outside world.”

“It’s important to remain true to your feelings.”

“I was nice to you and all you did was lie to me. I’m done with you.”

“To be empty of thirst, empty of wishing, empty of dreams, empty of joy and sorrow. Dead to himself, not to be a self any more, that was his goal. Once all of my self was overcome and had died, once every desire and every urge was silent in the heart, then the ultimate part of me had to awake, the innermost of my being, which is no longer my self.”

“He’s not the one who will protect you. That’s my job.”

“I could die at any time and when I do, I’m probably going to hell.”

"No," he said, “that's not my right. Nobody has the right to remove any single experience from another. Life and death are promised.
We have a right to pain."
THIS BOOK IS CRUSHING MY SOUL

"If you're being honest, why not say you are enjoying this beating you're giving yourself? That would be the truth. Why not be just what you are and do just what you do?" Cal sat in shock from this thought. Enjoying? Of course. By whipping himself he protected himself against whipping by someone else.

"You're growing up. Maybe that's it," he said softly. "Sometimes I think the world tests us most sharply then, and we turn inward and watch ourselves with horror.”

“What did he do when she left?"
"He died," said Lee.
"He walked around but he was dead. And only recently has he come half to life again."

“In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. We should try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.”

“You don't believe I brought you the letter because I don't want your money. You don't believe I loved you. And the men who come to you here with their ugliness, the men in the pictures, you don't believe those men could have goodness and beauty in them. You see only one side, and you think more than that, you're sure, that's all there is.”

"I know what you hate. You hate something in them you can't understand. You don't hate their evil. You hate the good in them you can't get at.”

“Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience."

"You have no love."
"I had.. enough to kill me."

“I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape. I suppose if that definition is strictly held to, then a writer of stories is a liar, if he is financially fortunate.”

“Humans are more poisonous than snakes. And if you ever saw death still breathing, there it was."

“You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect."

“And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.”

“Everyone concealed that little hell in himself, while publicly pretending it did not exist, and when he was caught up in it he was completely helpless.”

“And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?”

“No one could call him a liar. And this was mainly because the lie was in his head, and any truth coming from his mouth carried the color of the lie.”

“Adam was more afraid of the gentleness than he had been at the violence, for it seemed to him that he was being trained as a sacrifice, almost as though he was being subjected to kindness before death, the way victims intended to the gods were cuddled and flattered so that they might go happily to the stone and not outrage the gods with unhappiness.”

“You can boast about anything if it's all you have.
Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.”