Quotes

„One thing, however, did become clear to him [Goldmund] – why so many perfect works of art did not please him at all, why they were almost hateful and boring to him, in spite of a certain undeniable beauty. Workshops, churches, and palaces were full of these fatal works of art; he had even helped with a few himself. They were deeply disappointing because they aroused the desire for the highest and did not fulfill it. They lacked the most essential thing – mystery. That was what dreams and truly great works of art had in common: mystery.“

„How mysterious this life was, how deep and muddy its waters ran, yet how clear and noble what emerged from them.“

„It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement.“

„If I know what love is, it is because of you.“

arguments and unhappiness, and when anger overcame me at such times, I was a terror, doing and saying things whose vileness I felt deeply and painfully at the very moment I did

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.

All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?

We can understand one another, but each of us can only interpret himself.

But you do know—right?—that your fear of him is something totally improper? A fear like that ruins us, we’ve got to get rid of it. You’ve got to get rid of it if you’re to become a regular person. Do you understand?

Oh, I know it today: nothing in the world is more repugnant to a man than following the path that leads him to himself!

“I see that you think more than you can express. But, if that’s the case, you must also know that you have never fully lived out your thoughts, and that isn’t good. Only the thoughts that we live out have any value. You knew that your ‘permissible world’ was only half the world, and you tried to hide away the second half from yourself, the way clergymen and teachers do. You won’t succeed! No one can do that when he has once begun to think.”

Therefore each of us must discover for himself what is permitted and what is forbidden—forbidden to him.

When we hate a person, what we hate in his image is something inside ourselves. Whatever isn’t inside us can’t excite us.”

Everyone had only one true vocation: to find himself. Let him wind up as a poet or a madman, as a prophet or a criminal—that wasn’t his business; in the long run, it was irrelevant. His business was to discover his own destiny, not just any destiny, and to live it totally and undividedly. Anything else was just a half-measure, an attempt to run away, an escape back to the ideal of the masses, an adaptation, fear of one’s own nature. Fearsome and sacred, the new image rose up before me; I had sensed it a hundred times, perhaps I had already enunciated it, but now I was experiencing it for the first time. I was a gamble of Nature, a throw of the dice into an uncertain realm, leading perhaps to something new, perhaps to nothing; and to let this throw from the primordial depths take effect, to feel its will inside myself and adopt it completely as my own will: that alone was my vocation. That alone!

I had already experienced plenty of loneliness. Now I sensed that even deeper loneliness existed, and that it was inescapable.

They’re afraid because they have never accepted themselves. A community consisting exclusively of people afraid of the unknown in themselves! They all feel that the rules they live by are no longer valid, that they’re following outdated commandments; neither their religions nor their morality, nothing is suited to what we need. For a century and more, Europe has done nothing but study and build factories! They know exactly how many grams of powder it takes to kill someone, but they don’t know how to pray to God, they don’t even know how to be contented for an hour at a time.

Rather, Nature’s intentions for man are inscribed in individuals, in you and me.

“No one ever arrives home,” she said amiably. “But when the paths of friends meet, the whole world looks like home for a while.”

“It’s always difficult to be born. As you know, the bird must make an effort to break out of the egg. Think back and ask: Was the path really that difficult? Merely difficult? Wasn’t it also beautiful? Could you have thought of a more beautiful or easier one?”

All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?