Look within. Within is the fountain of the good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig. Book VII
Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage--his name is self. Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Certainly the prolonged education indispensable to the progress of Society is not natural to mankind. It cuts against the grain. A boy would like to follow his father in pursuit of food or prey. He would like to be doing serviceable things so far as his utmost strength allowed. He would like to be earning wages however small to help to keep up the home. He would like to have some leisure of his own to use or misuse as he pleased. He would ask little more than the right to work or starve. And then perhaps in the evenings a real love of learning would come to those who are worthy – and why try to stuff in those who are not? – and knowledge and thought would open the ‘magic casements’ of the mind. Never Give In!
It was the first rift in my father’s sanctity, it was the first nick in the pillars on which my childish life had rested, and which every human being must destroy before he can become himself. It is of these experiences, invisible to everyone, that the inner, essential line of our destiny consists. That kind of rift and nick closes over again, it is healed and forgotten, but in the most secret chamber of the mind it continues to live and bleed. Demian
Quotes