Absence, the highest form of presence.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (via goodreadss)
If you are never alone, you cannot know yourself.
Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra
wolf chasing the moon
Are we on the right road? Are we gaining knowledge? Are we approaching salvation? Or are we perhaps going in circles - we who thought to escape from the cycle?
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
It was the pure Language of the World. It required no explanation, just as the universe needs none as it travels through endless time. What the boy felt at that moment was that he was in the presence of the only woman in his life, and that, with no need for words, she recognized the same thing. He was more certain of it than of anything in the world. He had been told by his parents and grandparents that he must fall in love and really know a person before becoming committed. But maybe people who felt that way had never learned the universal language. Because, when you know that language, it's easy to understand that someone in the world awaits you, whether it's in the middle of the desert or in some great city. And when two such people encounter each other, and their eyes meet, the past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one's dreams would have no meaning.
Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity.
Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
And here is a doctrine at which you will laugh. It seems to me, Govinda, that love is the most important thing in the world
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself….His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one’s own inwardness.
Hermann Hesse
I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha