Sometimes it seems to me that in this absurdly random life there is some inherent justice in the outcome of personal relationships. In the long run, we get no more than we have been willing to risk giving.
This urge to make everything profound. What nonsense!
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that “talent” to the dark place where it leads.
I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on the earth is not a hardship but a pastime — if we live simply and wisely.
One has not only an ability to perceive the world but an ability to alter his perception of it; more simply, one can change things by the manner in which one looks at them.
Have you ever seen an inchworm crawl up a leaf or a twig, and then, clinging to the very end, revolve in the air, feeling for something, to reach something? That’s like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have footing.
If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is a man who has so much as to be out of danger?
It is the process of accumulation that creates habit, imitation, and for the mind that accumulates there is deterioration, death. But a mind that is not accumulating, not gathering, that is dying each day, each minute — for such a mind there is no death. It is in a state of infinite space.
So the mind must die to everything it has gathered — to all the habits, the imitated virtues, to all the things it has relied upon for its sense of security. Then it is no longer caught in the net of its own thinking. In dying to the past from moment to moment the mind is made fresh, therefore it can never deteriorate or set in motion the wave of darkness.
I used to dream sex./Now I dream dope./Soon I’ll dream light./Thank God there’s still hope.
I climb the road to Cold Mountain, The road to Cold Mountain that never ends. The valleys are long and strewn with stones; The streams broad and banked with thick grass. Moss is slippery, though no rain has fallen; Pines sigh, but it isn’t the wind. Who can break from the snares of the world And sit with me among the white clouds?
Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight, carry that weight a long time.
Here I am, fifty-eight, and I still don’t know what I’m going to be when I grow up.
Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
One sees it as marvelous, another also speaks of it as marvelous, but even after having heard of it, no one whatsoever knows it.
Finally you understand that the real motorcycle you’re working on is yourself.
There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. If one could but recall his vision by some sort of sign. It was in this hope that the arts were invented. Sign-posts on the way to what may be. Sign-posts toward greater knowledge.
By the street of by-and-by, one arrives at the house of never.
