As the great author James Salter once wrote, "How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?"
God instructs the heart, not by ideas but by pains and contradictions.
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
You have the right to work, but for the work’s sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work.
Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working. Never give way to laziness, either. Perform every action with your heart fixed on the Supreme Lord. Renounce attachment to the fruits.
Be even-tempered in success and failure; for it is this evenness of temper which is meant by yoga.
Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender. Seek refuge in the knowledge of Brahman. They who work selfishly for results are miserable.
O snail Climb Mount Fuji, But slowly, slowly!
What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.
When man is happy, the meaning of life and other eternal themes rarely interest him.
Men are so quick to blame the gods: they say
that we devise their misery. But they
themselves---in their depravity---design
grief greater than the griefs that fate assigns.
To be silent the whole day, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.
Everyone is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.
When one follows the path of individuation, when one lives one’s own life, one must take mistakes into the bargain. We may think there is a sure road. But that would be the road of death. Anyone who takes the sure road is as good as dead.
The future has not been written. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
There is a window facing my bed. The walls of the room are bare. How is it that I have lived in this house for ten years? Was there no day when I felt like hanging a picture on a wall? What have I done? No one alerted me. There, at last, here I am, a meaningless person. This is my end. I never hung a picture for fear of hanging a bad one; I never lived for fear of living poorly.
One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.
Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.
The crowd is the gathering place of the weakest; true creation is a solitary act.
I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself.
Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has elevated your soul, what has mastered it and at the same time delighted it? Place these venerated objects before you in a row, and perhaps they will yield for you, through their nature and their sequence, a law, the fundamental law of your true self. Compare these objects, see how one complements, expands, surpasses, transfigures another, how they form a stepladder upon which you have climbed up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies, not hidden deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you normally take to be yourself.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. By the mere fact of having come into existence, the most amazing novelty becomes in a few months, even a few days, a familiar and, as it were, self-evident part of the environment. Every aspiration is for a golden ceiling overhead; but the moment that ceiling has been reached, it becomes a commonplace and disregarded floor.
But I do feel strange — almost unearthly. I’ll never get used to being alive. It’s a mystery. Always startled to find I’ve survived.
“Sir, we ought to teach the people that they are doing wrong in worshipping the images and pictures in the temple.”
Ramakrishna: “That’s the way with you Calcutta people: you want to teach and preach. You want to give millions when you are beggars yourselves… . Do you think God does not know that he is being worshipped in the images and pictures? If a worshipper should make a mistake, do you not think God will know his intent?
It loved to happen.
I am tired of explaining the fire,
It burns because it must.
Material profit. Increase of knowledge. The augmentation of the complexity and intensity of the field of intelligent life. The enrichment of harmony and the greater glory of God. Curiosity. Adventure. Delight.
The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder. This is the ultimate penalty: the mind’s own state of confusion and alienation from the truth is its punishment. There is no need for any external force to punish it. This internal disorder, this turning away from the order and harmony of God’s creation, is the most severe penalty a soul can suffer.
Be careful how you interpret the world; it is like that.
To know the world, one must construct it.
There must be another room, somewhere down the hall, where the real meeting is happening, where the real experts are, making the real decisions … because it can’t just be us. It can’t just be this.
Interviewer: Can you discern talent in someone?
Baldwin: Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.
My father was a very disciplined and punctual man; it was a prerequisite for his creativity. There was a time for everything: for work, for talk, for solitude, for rest. No matter what time you get out of bed, go for a walk and then work, he’d say, because the demons hate it when you get out of bed, demons hate fresh air. So when I make up excuses not to work, I hear his voice in my head: Get up, get out, go to your work.
If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results.
Luck favors the prepared mind.
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.
I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.
The work of criticism is superfluous unless it is itself a work of art as independent of the work it criticizes as that is independent of the materials that went into it.
In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he perhaps would never have seen in himself. The reader’s recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth.
A transition from an author’s book to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur and magnificence; but when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke.
It’s been said that most of the great writers have bibliographies, not biographies. The kind of life requisite to their work leaves little behind but the words themselves. Even if we had the questionable privilege of watching them scribble for hours every day, we’d find more of who they were simply in the pages of their books.
I don’t know Who—or what—put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering;
But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone-or Something-and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.
From that moment I have known what it means “not to look back,” and “to take no thought for the morrow.” Led by the Ariadne’s thread of my answer through the labyrinth of Life, I came to a time and place where I realized that the Way leads to a triumph which is a catastrophe, and to a catastrophe which is a triumph, that the price for committing one’s life would be reproach, and that the only elevation possible to man lies in the depths of humiliation. After that, the word “courage” lost its meaning, since nothing could be taken from me.
Everything has a name, and so everything is already something else.
It is only by Art, and especially by Poetry, that the imagination is regulated. Nothing is more frightful than imagination without taste.
Man has it all in his hands, and it slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice.
There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands.
The trouble is, you think you have time.
If you feel far from God, who moved?
There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.
We think we understand the rules when we become adults, but what we really experienced is a narrowing of the imagination.
Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighitng against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.
If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come. There are, of course, moments when the pressure of the excitement is so great that only superhuman self-control would resist it. They come both in war and peace. We must do the best we can.
People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. It didn’t even know they were there.
No list of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later.
Interviewer: There’s a certain aesthetic to the way you live. You once talked about using good silver every day.
Didion: Well, every day is all there is.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
The darker the night, the brighter the stars. The deeper the grief, the closer is God.
In the real dark night of the soul it is always 3 o’clock in the morning, day after day.
Whoever you are, go out into the evening, leaving your room, of which you know every bit; your house is the last before the infinite, whoever you are.
The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.
The question is asked in ignorance, by one who does not even know what can have led him to ask it.
We will never know self-realization.
We are two abysses — a well staring at the sky.
Be careful, however, lest this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady. You must linger among a limited number of master thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends. And the same thing must hold true of men who seek intimate acquaintance with no single author, but visit them all in a hasty and hurried manner.
Rule 1: Find a place you trust, and then, try trusting it for awhile.
Rule 2: (General Duties as a Student)
Pull everything out of your teacher. Pull everything out of your fellow students.
Rule 3: (General Duties as a Teacher) Pull everything out of your students.
Rule 4: Consider everything an experiment.
Rule 5: Be Self Disciplined. This means finding someonee wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self disciplined is to follow in a better way.
Rule 6: Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
Rule 7: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It is the people who do all the work all the time who eventually catch onto things. You can fool the fans—but not the players.
Rule 8: Do not try to create and analyze at the same time. They are different processes.
Rule 9: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It is lighter than you think.
Rule 10: We are breaking all the rules, even our own rules and how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for ‘x’ qualities.
Rule 1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
Rule 2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
Rule 4. Be in love with yr life
Rule 6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
Rule 8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
Rule 13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
Rule 14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
Rule 15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
Rule 17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
Rule 19. Accept loss forever
Rule 23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
Rule 24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
Rule 25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
Rule 29. You’re a Genius all the time
All explanation must disappear, and description alone takes its place.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Avoid metaphors, which can introduce unneeded baggage.
Behind a remarkable scholar one often finds a mediocre man, and behind a mediocre artist, often, a remarkable man.