The exchange of one fear or pleasure or pain for another fear or pleasure or pain, which are measured like coins, the greater with the less, is not the exchange of virtue. O, my dear Simmias, is there not one true coin, for which all things ought to exchange?—and that is wisdom; and only in exchange for this, and in company with this, is anything truly bought or sold, whether courage or temperance or justice. ...in the true exchange, there is a purging away of all these things, and temperance, and justice, and courage, and wisdom herself are a purgation of them.
O! I am Fortune's fool.
Sensuality often hastens the growth of love so much that the roots remain weak and are easily torn up.
We are all convention; convention carries us away, and we neglect the substance of things. . . . We dare not call our parts by their right names, but are not afraid to use them for every sort of debauchery.
Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.
Fire tries gold, misery tries brave men.
Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.
Our greatest human freedom is that, despite whatever our physical situation is in life, WE ARE ALWAYS FREE TO CHOOSE OUR THOUGHTS!
It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.
Observe always that everything is the result of a change, and get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and to make new ones like them.
Immortality is but ubiquity in time.
“An artist's flair is sometimes worth a scientist's brains.”
Short cuts make delays, but inns make longer ones
The meaning of my life is to help others find meaning in theirs.
I have taken more good from alcohol than alcohol has taken from me.
When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.
“The sound of trees comes from all sides. From leaves, branches, roots… If you put your ear to my trunk, you can hear my heartbeat.”
For nothing matters except life; and, of course, order.
“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.”
It is better to be making the news than taking it; to be an actor rather than a critic.
In order to obtain and hold power, a man must love it.
Nothing is more repulsive than a furtively prurient spirituality; it is just as unsavory as gross sensuality.
If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.
I tell everyone very plainly that I take bribes, but what kind of bribes? Why, greyhound puppies. That's a totally different matter.
Come what come may, Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.
To escape boredom, man works either beyond what his usual needs require, or else he invents play, that is, work that is designed to quiet no need other than that for working in general.
He didn't at all see why the busy bee should be proposed as a model to him; he supposed the Bee liked to make honey, or he wouldn't do it -- nobody asked him. It was not necessary for the bee to make such a merit of his tastes.
As we shall see, the prerequisites for those developments consisted of several features of human society that determined whether a society would find writing useful, and whether the society could support the necessary specialist scribes.
By the streets of "by and by" one arrives at the house of "never."
One way to explain the complexity and unpredictability of historical systems, despite their ultimate determinacy, is to note that long chains of causation may separate final effects from ultimate causes lying outside the domain of that field of science.
How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables for us?
The history of the Roman Empire is also the history of the uprising of the Empire of the Masses, who absorb and annul the directing minorities and put themselves in their place. Then, also, is produced the phenomenon of agglomeration, of "the full." For that reason, as Spengler has very well observed, it was necessary, just as in our day, to construct enormous buildings. The epoch of the masses is the epoch of the colossal.
There is nothing that so raises a young man's self-esteem, that so contributes to the formation of his character as for him to find himself unexpectedly confronted with a task which he has to accomplish entirely on his own initiative and by his own efforts.
One may be humble out of pride.
Negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, you are supposed to do something.
Like all sciences and all valuations, the psychology of women has hitherto been considered only from the point of view of men.
Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.
Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
This village belongs to the Castle, and whoever lives here or passes the night here does so in a manner of speaking in the Castle itself. Nobody may do that without the Count's permission.
Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
First principle: one must need strength, otherwise one will never have it.
The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.
A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.
What does the brain matter compared with the heart?
Dogmatics must be designed in this way. Above all, every science must vigorously lay hold of its own beginning and not live in complicated relations with other sciences. If dogmatics begins by wanting to explain sinfulness or by wanting to prove its actuality, no dogmatics will come out of it, but the entire existence of dogmatics will become problematic and vague.
"So then he started working especially hard, with a fiery vigour that raised him from a junior salesman to a travelling representative almost overnight, bringing with it the chance to earn money in quite different ways."
But the soul which has been polluted, and is impure at the time of her departure, and is the companion and servant of the body always, and is in love with and fascinated by the body and by the desires and pleasures of the body, until she is led to believe that the truth exists only in bodily form, which a man may touch and see and taste and use for the purposes of his lusts—the soul, I mean, accustomed to hate and fear and avoid the intellectual principle, which to the bodily eye is dark and invisible, and can be attained only by philosophy—do you suppose that such a soul as this will depart pure and unalloyed?
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
Demian
To tell my story I have to start far in the past. If I could, I’d have to go back much farther yet, to the very earliest years of my childhood and even beyond them to my distant origins.