Itself - Quotes
Math is like water. It has a lot of difficult theories, of course, but its basic logic is very simple. Just as water flows from high to low over the shortest possible distance, figures can only flow in one direction. You just have to keep your eye on them for the route to reveal itself. That’s all it takes. You don’t have to do a thing. Just concentrate your attention and keep your eyes open, and the figures make everything clear to you. In this whole, wide world, the only thing that treats me so kindly is math.
Thinking must never submit itself, neither to a dogma, nor to a party, nor to a passion, nor to an interest, nor to a preconceived idea, nor to whatever it may be, if not to facts themselves, because, for it, to submit would be to cease to be.
Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.
Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on the planet, and we hold the paintbrush.
In order for us to liberate the energy of our strength, our weakness must first have a chance to reveal itself.
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.
If life in itself were a valuable possession and decidedly preferable to non-existence, the gate need not be occupied by such terrible guards as death and its terrors. But who would persevere in life as it is, if death were less frightful? And who could even so much as endure the thought of death, if life were a joy?
Strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.
To see nothing anywhere but what you may reach it and pass it,
To conceive no time, however distant, but what you may reach it and pass it,
To look up or down no road but it stretches and waits for you,
(...)
To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.
At some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not.
You are permanent within me in this chaos.
Somewhere deep in my mind you shine forever, without
moving, silent, like the angel awed by death,
or like the insect burying itself
in the rotted heart of a tree.
Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is not mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.
Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.
Evil is like water, it abounds, is cheap, soon fouls, but runs itself clear of taint.