Faiz Ahmad Faiz

Sozish-e-dard kissay maaloom!

Kon jaanay kissi ke ishq ka raaz
Meri khaamoshiyon main larzaan hai

Meray naalon ki gumshuda aawaaz

Emily Dickinson

My river runs to thee:

Blue sea, wilt thou welcome me?
My river waits reply.

Oh sea, look graciously!
I ’ll fetch thee brooks

From spotted nooks,—
Say, sea,Take me!

Henry David Thoreau

The Inward Morning

Packed in my mind lie all the clothes
Which outward nature wears,
And in its fashion's hourly change
It all things else repairs.
In vain I look for change abroad,
And can no difference find,
Till some new ray of peace uncalled
Illumes my inmost mind.
What is it gilds the trees and clouds,
And paints the heavens so gay,
But yonder fast-abiding light
With its unchanging ray?
Lo, when the sun streams through the wood,
Upon a winter's morn,
Where'er his silent beams intrude,
The murky night is gone.
How could the patient pine have known
The morning breeze would come,
Or humble flowers anticipate
The insect's noonday hum--
Till the new light with morning cheer
From far streamed through the aisles,
And nimbly told the forest trees
For many stretching miles?
I've heard within my inmost soul
Such cheerful morning news,
In the horizon of my mind
Have seen such orient hues,
As in the twilight of the dawn,
When the first birds awake,
Are heard within some silent wood,
Where they the small twigs break,
Or in the eastern skies are seen,
Before the sun appears,
The harbingers of summer heats
Which from afar he bears.

The real magic lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

~Mexican saying

James Joyce

Ulysses
It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don't spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness...

The heaven tree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.What? says Alf.Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred

Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.

Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear? Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his cometary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. Somewhere imperceptibly he would hear and somehow reluctantly, suncompelled, obey the summons of recall. Whence, disappearing from the constellation of the Northern Crown he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the constellation of Cassiopeia and after incalculable eons of peregrination return an estranged avenger, a wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources (by supposition) surpassing those of Rothschild or the silver king.

Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.


Finnegans Wake
Three quarks for Muster Mark!

But all they are all there scraping along to sneeze out a likelihood that will solve and salve life's robulous rebus

came at this time coloured place where we live in our paroqial fermament one tide on another

Can you nei do her, numb? asks Dolph, suspecting the answer know. Oikkont, ken you, ninny? asks Kev, expecting the answer guess.

He caun ne'er be bothered but maun e'er be waked. If there is a future in every past that is present Quis est qui non novit quinnigan and Qui quae quot at Quinnigan's Quake! Stump! His producers are they not his consumers? Your exagmination round his factification for incamination of a warping process. Declaim!

End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousands thee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.


Stephen Hero
He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this? This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office with his no less inscrutable countenance:—Yes, said Stephen. I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin's street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphanyImagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised. It is just in this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty. ... No aesthetic theory, pursued Stephen relentlessly, is of any value which investigates with the aid of the lantern of tradition. What we symbolise in black the Chinaman may symbolise in yellow: each has his own tradition. Greek beauty laughs at Coptic beauty and the American Indian derides them both. It is almost impossible to reconcile all tradition whereas it is by no means impossible to find the justification of every form of beauty which has ever been adored on the earth by an examination into the mechanism of esthetic apprehension whether it be dressed in red, white, yellow or black. We have no reason for thinking that the Chinaman has a different system of digestion from that which we have though our diets are quite dissimilar. The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinised in action. —You know what Aquinas says: The three things requisite for beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry and radiance. Some day I will expand that sentence into a treatise.

Consider the performance of your own mind when confronted with any object, hypothetically beautiful. Your mind to apprehend that object divides the entire universe into two parts, the object, and the void which is not the object. To apprehend it you must lift it away from everything else: and then you perceive that it is one integral thing, that is a thing. You recognise its integrity. Isn't that so?— And then?—That is the first quality of beauty: it is declared in a simple sudden synthesis of the faculty which apprehends. What then? Analysis then. The mind considers the object in whole and in part, in relation to itself and to other objects, examines the balance of its parts, contemplates the form of the object, traverses every cranny of the structure. So the mind receives the impression of the symmetry of the object. The mind recognises that the object is in the strict sense of the word, a thing, a definitely constituted entity. You see?— Let us turn back, said Cranly. Now for the third quality. For a long time I couldn't make out what Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative word (a very unusual thing for him) but I have solved it. Claritas is quidditas. After the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.
Having finished his argument Stephen walked on in silence. He felt Cranly's hostility and he accused himself of having cheapened the eternal images of beauty. For the first time, too, he felt slightly awkward in his friend's company and to restore a mood of flippant familiarity he glanced up at the clock of the Ballast Office and smiled:— It has not epiphanised yet, he said.


Random Quotes:
Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life.

All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light, but though I seem to be driven out of my country as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.

Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul.

"Molly Bloom was a down-to-earth lady" said Joyce. "She would never have indulged in anything so refined as a stream of consciousness." (on the failed assumption that ulysses was a stream of consciousness styled prose)

There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.

He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen. "A Little Cloud"

But there was no harshness in the eyes which, looking at the world from under their tawny eyebrows, gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet a redeeming instinct in others but often disappointed. He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense. "A Painful Case


"Does nobody understand?" Last words (January 1941)

Rainer Maria Rilke

Again and again, however we know the landscape of love

and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,

and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others

fall: again and again the two of us walk out together

under the ancient trees, lie down again and again

among the flowers, face to face with the sky.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience,which is the bitterest.

~Confucius

Octavio Paz

Between Going and Staying

Between going and staying the day wavers,

in love with its own transparency.

The circular afternoon is now a bay

where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,

all is near and can't be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,

rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats

the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall

into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,

watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters.

Motionless, I stay and go:

I am a pause.

Neruda

Es la hora, amor mío, de apartar esta rosa sombría,cerrar las estrellas, enterrar la ceniza en la tierra:y, en la insurrección de la luz, despertar con los que despertarono seguir en el sueño alcanzando la otra orilla del mar que no tiene otra orilla.

It is time, love, to break off that sombre rose,shut up the stars and bury the ash in the earth;and, in the rising of the light, wake with those who awoke or go on in the dream, reaching the other shore of the sea which has no other shore.

"The Watersong Ends" (La Barcarola Termina)

Nezāmi-ye Ganjavī ("The Labors of Farhad")

The Labors of Farhad(excerpt)

On lofty Beysitoun the lingering sun
looks down on ceaseless labors, long begun:
The mountain trembles to the echoing sound
Of falling rocks, that from her sides rebound.
Each day all respite, all repose denied---
No truce, no pause, the thundering strokes are plied;
The mist of night around her summit coils,
But still Farhad, the lover-artist, toils,
And still---the flashes of his axe between---
He sighs to ev'ry wind, "Alas! Shireen!
Alas! Shireen!---my task is well-nigh done,
The goal in view for which I strive alone.
Love grants me powers that Nature might deny;
And, whatsoe'er my doom, the world shall tell,
Thy lover gave to immortality
Her name he loved---so fatally---so well!
A hundred arms were weak one block to move
Of thousands, molded by the hand of Love
Into fantastic shapes and forms of grace,
Which crowd each nook of that majestic place.
The piles give way, the rocky peaks divide,
The stream comes gushing on---a foaming tide!
A mighty work, for ages to remain,
The token of his passion and his pain.
As flows the milky flood from Allah's throne
Rushes the torrent from the yielding stone;
And sculptured there, amazed, stern Khosru stands,
And sees, with frowns, obeyed his harsh commands:
While she, the fair beloved, with being rife,
Awakes the glowing marble into life.
Ah! hapless youth; ah! toil repaid by woe---
A king thy rival and the world thy foe!
Will she wealth, splendor, pomp for thee resign---
And only genius, truth, and passion thine!
Around the pair, lo! groups of courtiers wait,
And slaves and pages crowd in solemn state;
From columns imaged wreaths their garlands throw,
And fretted roofs with stars appear to glow!
Fresh leaves and blossoms seem around to spring,
And feathered throngs their loves are murmuring;
The hands of Peris might have wrought those stems,
Where dewdrops hang their fragile diadems;
And strings of pearl and sharp-cut diamonds shine,
New from the wave, or recent from the mine.
"Alas! Shireen!" at every stroke he cries;
At every stroke fresh miracles arise:
"For thee these glories and these wonders all,
For thee I triumph, or for thee I fall;
For thee my life one ceaseless toil has been,
Inspire my soul anew: Alas! Shireen!"
What raven note disturbs his musing mood?
What form comes stealing on his solitude?
Ungentle messenger, whose word of ill
All the warm feelings of his soul can chill!
"Cease, idle youth, to waste thy days," she said,
"By empty hopes a visionary made;
Why in vain toil thy fleeting life consume
To frame a palace?---rather hew a tomb.
Even like sere leaves that autumn winds have shed,
Perish thy labors, for---Shireen is dead!"
He heard the fatal news---no word, no groan;
He spoke not, moved not, stood transfixed to stone.
Then, with a frenzied start, he raised on high
His arms, and wildly tossed them toward the sky;
Far in the wide expanse his axe he flung
And from the precipice at once he sprung.
The rocks, the sculptured caves, the valleys green,
Sent back his dying cry--- "Alas! Shireen!"

For Layla!(I am eternally Yours)

Nizami's Version:

Every breeze that blows
brings your scent to me;
Every bird that sings
calls out your name to me;
Every dream that appears
brings your face to me;
Every glance at your face
has left its trace with me.
I am yours, I am yours,
whether near or far;
Your grief is mine, all mine,
wherever you are.

Eric Clapton's version:
I am yours.
However distant you may be,
There blows no wind but wafts your scent to me,
There sings no bird but calls your name to me.
Each memory that has left its trace with me
Lingers forever as a part of me.

I am yours.
However distant you may be,
There blows no wind but wafts your scent to me,
There sings no bird but calls your name to me.
Each memory that has left its trace with me
Lingers forever as a part of me.

I am yours.
However distant you may be,
There blows no wind but wafts your scent to me,
There sings no bird but calls your name to me.
Each memory that has left its trace with me
Lingers forever as a part of me.

I am yours.

Matthew Arnold

Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;--on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Ode To Love(Faiz Ahmad Faiz)

us ne kahaa aao,

us ne kahaa Thehro

muskuraao kahaa us ne

mar jaao kahaa us ne

maiN aaya,

maiN Thehar gayaa,

muskuraaaya

aur mar bhii gayaa

{English Translation by Agha Shahid Ali from The Rebel’s Silhouette}

For Vera

She said Come

She said Stay

Smile she said

She said Die

I came

I didn’t leave

Yes, I smiled

And I even died.

(Translated from Faiz’s Urdu version of a poem by Nazim Hikmet addressed to his Russian wife, Vera)

Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home!(J.RUMI)

You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl through life?

Love is the ark appointed for the righteous,Which annuls the danger and provides a way of escape.Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment intuition

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it.Whoever has polished it more sees more — more unseen forms become manifest to him.

I died as a mineral and became a plant,I died as plant and rose to animal,I died as animal and I was Man.Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soarWith angels blest; but even from angelhoodI must pass on: all except God doth perish.When I have sacrificed my angel-soul,I shall become what no mind e'er conceived.Oh, let me not exist! for Non-existenceProclaims in organ tones, To Him we shall return.

Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.

I am so happy, I cannot be contained in the world;But like a spirit, I am hidden from the eyes of the world.If the foot of the trees were not tied to earth, they would be pursuing me;For I have blossomed so much, I am the envy of the gardens.

The men of God are like fishes in the ocean; they pop up into view on the surface here and there and everywhere, as they please.


The fault is in the blamer — Spirit sees nothing to criticize.

Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.

Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving — it doesn't matter,
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow a hundred times,
Come, come again, come.

I want a heart which is split, part by part, because of the pain of separation from God, so that I might explain my longing and complaint to it.

God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites, so that you will have two wings to fly, not one.This discipline and rough treatment are a furnace to extract the silver from the dross.This testing purifies the gold by boiling the scum away.


Fortunate is he who does not carry envy as a companion.

The idol of your self is the mother of all idols.

To regard the self as easy to subdue is a mistake. If you wish mercy, show mercy to the weak. If you dig a pit for others to fall into,you will fall into it yourself. Many of the faults you see in others, dear reader,are your own nature reflected in them.

The lion who breaks the enemy's ranks is a minor hero compared to the lion who overcomes himself.

Whoever gives reverence receives reverence.

Were there no men of vision,all who are blind would be dead.

If you are wholly perplexed and in straits,have patience, for patience is the key to joy. If you are irritated by every rub,how will your mirror be polished?

Anyone in whom the troublemaking self has died,sun and cloud obey.

If you wish to shine like day,burn up the night of self-existence.Dissolve in the Being who is everything. There is no worse sickness for the soul,O you who are proud, than this pretense of perfection.

The heart and eyes must bleed a lot before self-complacency falls away. When the remedy you have offered only increases the disease, then leave him who will not be cured, and tell your story to someone who seeks the truth.

All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.



Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.
Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home.

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.I don't plan it.When I'm outside the saying of it,I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

There is a community of the spirit-Join it, and feel the delight of walking in the noisy street,and being the noise.


What is the body? That shadow of a shadowof your love, that somehow contains the entire universe.

There is no reality but God,says the completely surrendered sheikh, who is an ocean for all beings.


Disputational knowing wants customers.It has no soul.

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absent-minded.Someone sober will worry about events going badly.Let the lover be.


I can't stop pointing to the beauty. Every moment and place says,"Put this design in your carpet!"

From Hallaj, I learned to hunt lions, but I became something hungrier than a lion.

Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being.This dance is the joy of existence. I am filled with you.Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul.There's no room for lack of trust, or trust.Nothing in this existence but that existence


Do not believe in an absurdity no matter who says it.Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river. When the ocean is searching for you, don't walk into the language-river. Listen to the ocean,and bring your talking business to an end.

Traditional words are just babbling in that presence, and babbling is a substitute for sight.

Every object and being in the universe is a jar overflowing with wisdom and beauty,a drop of the Tigris that cannot be contained by any skin. Every jarful spill and makes the earth more shining, as though covered in satin.
You knock at the door of Reality. You shake your thought wings, loosen your shoulders, and open;Lovers think they are looking for each other,but there is only one search: wanderingThis world is wandering that, both inside one transparent sky. In here there is no dogma and no heresy.

The cure for pain is in the pain.Good and bad are mixed. If you don't have both,you don't belong with us.

Learn from Ali how to fight without your ego participating.God's lion did nothing that didn't originate from his deep center.I am God's Lion, not the lion of passion....I have no longing except for the One.When a wind of personal reaction comes,I do not go along with it.There are many winds full of anger,and lust and greed. They move the rubbish around,but the solid mountain of our true nature stays where it's always been

This that we are now created the body, cell by cell,like bees building a honeycomb. The human body and the universe grew from this, not this from the universe and the human body.

Do not grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.

Every tree and plant in the meadow seemed to be dancing, those which average eyes would see as fixed and still. God's joy moved from unmarked box to unmarked box,from cell to cell.

Observe the wonders as they occur around you.Don't claim them. Feel the artistry moving through, and be silent.
When the soul lies down in that grass,the world is too full to talk aboutlanguage, ideas, even the phrase each otherdoesn't make any sense.Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoingThere is a field.I will meet you there

Are you fleeing from Love because of a single humiliation?What do you know of Love except the name?Love has a hundred forms of pride and disdain,and is gained by a hundred means of persuasion.Since Love is loyal, it purchases one who is loyal:it has no interest in a disloyal companion.

The human being resembles a tree; its root is a covenant with God:that root must be cherished with all one's might.

Come, seek, for search is the foundation of fortune:every success depends upon focusing the heart.
Even though you're not equipped,keep searching:equipment isn't necessary on the way to the Lord. If an ant seeks the rank of Solomon,don't smile contemptuously upon its quest.Everything you possess of skill, and wealth and handicraft,wasn't it first merely a thought and a quest?

That which God said to the rose,and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty,He said to my heart,and made it a hundred times more beautiful.

Many have been led astray by the Qur'an:by clinging to that rope many have fallen into the well.There is no fault in the rope, O perverse man,for it was you who had no desire to reach the top

If in thirst you drink water from a cup, you see God in it. Those who are not in love with God will see only their own faces in it.

The lower self does not want anyone to receive anything from anybody else, and if it is aware of something receiving a special boon, it seeks to destroy it. Whatever posessions and objects of its desires the lower self may obtain, it hangs on to them, refusing to let them go out of greed for more, or out of fear of poverty and need.

To Love is to reach God.Never will a Lover's chest feel any sorrow.Never will a Lover's robe be touched by mortals.Never will a Lover's body be found buried in the earth.To Love is to reach God.

When in Love,body, mind, heart and soul don't even exist. Love rests on no foundation.It is an endless ocean,with no beginning or end. They will ask you what you have produced.Say to them,except for Love,what else can a Lover produce?

My head is bursting with the joy of the unknown.My heart is expanding a thousand fold.Every cell, taking wings,flies about the world.All seek separately the many faces of my Beloved.

There is a certain cloud,impregnated with at housand lightnings.There is my body,in it an ocean formed of his glory,all the creation,all the universes,all the galaxies,are lost in it.

I always thought thatI was me — but no,I was you and never knew it.
This is a gathering of Lovers.In this gathering there is no high, no low,no smart, no ignorant,no special assembly,no grand discourse,no proper schooling required.There is no master,no disciple.This gathering is more like a drunken party, full of tricksters, fools,mad men and mad women.This is a gathering of Lovers.

Love said to me,there is nothing that is not me.Be silent.

I don't know where I am.At times I plunge to the bottom of the sea,at times, rise up like the Sun. At times, the universe is pregnant by me,at times I give birth to it.

A hundred souls cried out, but we are yours, we are yours, we are yours.You are the light that spoke to Moses and said I am God, I am God, I am God.I said Shams-e Tabrizi, who are you?He said, I am you, I am you, I am you.

Even if you lose yourself in wrath for a hundred thousand years,at the end you will discover,it is me, who is the culmination of your dreams.

He is like a man using a candle to look for the sun.

Like a thief reason sneaked in and sat amongst the lovers eager to give them advice. They were unwilling to listen, so reason kissed their feet and went on its way.

Only from the heart can you touch the sky.

Pilgrimage to the place of the wise is to find escape from the flame of separateness.

Do you think I know what I’m doing?That for one breath or half a breath I belong to myself?As much as a pen knows what it is writingIt may be the satisfaction I need depends on my going awaySo that when I’ve gone and come back, I’ll find it at home.

Reason is like an officer when the king appears. The officer then loses his power and hides himself. Reason is the shadow cast by God; God is the sun. Reason is powerless in the expression of Love.

Return from existence to nonexistence. You are seeking the Lord and you belong to him.Nonexistence is a place of income; flee it not. This existence of more and less is a place of expenditure. Something opens our wings.

Something makes boredom and hurt disappear.Someone fills the cup in front of us: We taste only sacredness.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you; Don't go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want; Don't go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep.

The Eternal looked upon me for a moment with His eye of power, and annihilated me in His being, and become manifest to me in His essence. I saw I existed through Him.

The lion is most handsome when looking for food.

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.

We can’t help being thirsty, moving toward the voice of water. We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust.

When I am with you, we stay up all night. When you're not here, I can't go to sleep. Praise God for those two insomnias! And the difference between them.

Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence.

You are quaffing drink from a hundred fountains: whenever any of these hundred yields less, your pleasure is diminished. But when the sublime fountain gushes from within you, no longer need you steal from the other fountains. You are the deep innerness of all things, the last word that can be spoken. To each of us you reveal yourselves differently: to the ship as coastline, to the shore as ship.

How could the rays of God's light fit into the heart? Yet when you search you will find it there, not from the point of view of containment such that it could be said that the light is in that place. You will find it through that place …
Oh, there is many a trusty, martyred ego that has died in this world but walks about like the living. The brigand spirit has died, but its sword remains in the hand of the warrior. The sword is the same sword, but the man is not the same man -- the form confuses you. Once the ego has been transformed, the sword -- the body -- is held in the hand of the Bountiful Lord's craftsmanship.

What is it to know something of God? Burn inside that presence. Burn up.

Love is for vanishing into the sky.

God calls, … "Come out of your selves quickly, or else every instant will be a shackle, every two paces snares and traps." Come out of ourselves? But to where? To selflessness! Selflessness is meaning, meaning! Self-consciousness is names, names!

Do not break with the prophet of your time! Do not rely on your own skills and footsteps! Though you be a lion, if you travel the Path without a guide, you will be a self-seer, astray and contemptible.

If you want dervishhood, spiritual poverty, and emptiness, you must be friends with a sheikh. Talking about it, reading books, and doing practices don't help. Soul receives from soul that knowing.

Let go of thought and bring it not into your heart, for you are naked and thought is an icy wind. You think in order to escape from torment and suffering, but your thinking is torment's fountainhead. Know that the bazaar of God's Making is outside of thought…

So behead your selfhood, oh warrior! Become selfless and annihilated, like a dervish! When you have become selfless, you are secure in whatever you do: Thou didst not throw when thou threwest, but God threw (Koran 8:17).

For those who realize that everything is from God, everything is the same.......

Brother, stand the pain. Escape the poison of your impulses. The sky will bow to your beauty, if you do.
What sort of Beloved is He? As long as a single hair of love for yourself remains, He will not show His Face… You must be completely repelled by yourself and the world and be your own self's enemy… So when our religion resides in a person's heart, it stays right there until it takes his heart to God and separates it from everything unworthy.

Some one asked, "What is the Way?" I said, "This way is to abandon desires."

Oh lover of the King! Know that your way is to seek the pleasure of that Generous Lord. When you seek the Beloved's desire and pleasure, seeking your own desire is forbidden.

All the hopes, desires, loves, and affections that people have for different things -- fathers, mothers, friends, heavens, the earth, gardens, palaces, sciences, works, food, drink -- the saint knows that these are desires for God and all those things are veils. When men leave this world and see the King without these veils, then they will know that all were veils and coverings, that the object of their desire was in reality that One Thing… They will see all things face to face.

In a human being is such a love, a pain, an itch, a desire that, even if he were to possess a hundred thousand worlds, he would not rest or find peace. People work variously at all sorts of callings, crafts, and professions, and they learn astrology and medicine, and so forth, buth they are not at peace because what they are seeking cannot be found. The beloved is called dilaram because the heart finds peace through the beloved. How then can it find peace through anything else?

Now some men have followed the intellect to such an extent that they have become totally angels and sheer light. They are the prophets and saints…

In some men sensuality has dominated their intellects, so that they have totally assumed the properties of animals.
And some men have remained struggling. They are that group who feel inside themselves a suffering, a pain, a distress, a longing. They are not satisfied with their lives. These are the believers. The saints are waiting to bring the believers into their own houses and make them like themselves. And the satans are also waiting to drag them down toward themselves to the lowest of the low (Koran 95:5).

The intellect is luminous and seeks the good. How then can the dark ego vanquish it? The ego is in its own bodily home, and your intellect is a stranger; At its doorstep, a dog is an awesome lion.

Who knows his soul knows his Lord.

Man is called a rational animal; therefore, he is two things. What feeds his animality in this world is passion and desire; but the food for his essential part is knowledge, wisdom and the vision of God. Man's animal nature avoids the Real, and his human nature flies from this world. One of you is an unbeliever, and another of you is a believer. (Koran 64:2).

I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I've been knocking from the inside!

Intellect is good and desirable to the extent it brings you to the King's door. Once you have reached His door, then divorce the intellect! From this time on, the intellect will be to your loss and a brigand. When you reach Him, entrust yourself to Him! You have no business with the how and the wherefore. Know that the intellect's cleverness all belongs to the vestibule. Even if it possesses the knowledge of Plato, it is still outside of the palace
You seek knowledge from books. What a shame! … You are an ocean of knowledge hidden in a dew drop…
Someone was saying: "I have studied so many branches of knowledge and mastered so many concepts; yet I still do not know which concept in man will abide forever. I have not discovered it yet."

If it could be known by means of words, there would be no need for the annihilation of individual existence or for so much suffering. You must strive to rid yourself of your own individuation before you can know that thing which will remain.

That intellectual warp and woof keeps you wrapped in blindness

His mental questionings form the barrier. His physical eyesight bandages his knowing. Self-consciousness plugs his ears.

All of these are symbols -- I mean that the other world keeps coming into this world. Like cream hidden in the soul of milk, No-place keeps coming into place. Like intellect concealed in blood and skin, the Traceless keeps entering into traces. And from beyond the intellect, beautiful Love comes dragging its skirts, a cup of wine in its hand. And from beyond Love, that indescribable One who can only be called "That" keeps coming.

Love is the cure,for your pain will keep giving birth to more pain until your eyes constantly exhale love as effortlessly as your body yields its scent.

Never be without rememberance of Him,for His rememberance gives strength and wings to the bird of the Spirit.If that objective of yours is fully realized, that is"Light upon Light"... ...But at the very least, by practicing God's rememberance your inner being will be illuminated little by little and you will achieve some measure of detachment from the world.

Love and reputation, brother,are not in harmony:don’t stand at the door of reputation, if you are a lover.

The Beloved is in the sight,and the sight is in the Beloved.

Someone asked what there was that was superior to prayer. One answer is that "the soul" of prayer is better than prayer. The second answer is that faith is better than prayer.Prayer consists of five-times-a-day performance, whereas faith is continuous. Prayer can be dropped for a valid excuse and may be postponed by license; faith cannot be dropped for any excuse and may not be postponed by license. Again, faith without prayer is beneficial, whereas prayer without faith confers no benefit.

Whoever travels without a guide needs two hundred years for a two-day journey.

The True teacher knocks down the idol that the student makes of him.

By love, bitter things are made sweet and copper turns to go . By love, the sediment becomes clear and torment is removed. By love, the dead are made to live. By love, the sovereign is made a slave.This love is the fruit of knowledge. When did folly sit on a throne like this?The faith of love is separated from all religion. For lovers the faith and the religion is God. 0 spirit, in striving and seeking become like running water. 0 reason, at all times be ready to give up mortality for the sake of immortality.Remember God always, that self may be forgotten, so that your self may be effaced in the One to Whom you pray, without care for who is praying, or the prayer.

Wisdom is like the rain. Its source is unlimited, but it comes down according to the season. Grocers put sugar in a bag, but their supply of sugar is not the amount in the bag. When you come to a grocer, he has sugar in abundance. But he sees how much money you have brought and gives accordingly.Your currency on this Path is resolution and faith, and you are taught according to your resolution and faith. When you come seeking sugar, they examine your bag to see what its capacity is; then they measure out accordingly.

Every form that you see has its original in the divine world. If the form passes away, it is of no consequence, because its original was from eternity. Be not grieved that every form that you see, every mystical saying that you have heard will pass away. The fountainhead is always bringing forth water. Since neither ceases, why should you complain? Consider this spirit as a fountain; rivers flow from it. Put regret out of your thoughts, and keep on drinking from the rivulet. Do not be afraid. The water is limitless.

It is necessary to have a guide for the spiritual journey. Choose a master, for without one this journey is full of trials, fears, and dangers. With no escort, you would be lost on a road you have already taken. Do not travel alone on the Path.

I've spent my life, my heart And my eyes this way. I used to think that love And beloved are different. I know now they are the same. I was seeing two in one.

Listen for the stream

that tells you one thing.
Die on this bank.

Begin in me

the way of rivers

with the sea.

Faiz Ahmad Faiz

Last night your faded memory came to me

As in the wilderness spring comes quietly,

As, slowly, in the desert, moves the breeze,

As, to a sick man, without cause, comes peace.

Oscar Wilde

To My Wife - With A Copy Of My Poems

I can write no stately poem

As a prelude to my lay;
From a poet to a poem
I would dare to say.

For if of these fallen petals
One to you seem fair,
Love will waft it till it settles
On your hair.

And when wind and winter harden

All the loveless land,
It will whisper of the garden,
You will understand.

Richard Bach

"You don't want a million answers as much

as you want a few forever questions.

The questions are diamonds you hold in the light.

Study a lifetime and you see different colors from the same jewel. "

Hermann Hesse

Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.

Demian:
*But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of consideration.
*The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God.
*I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me.
*I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.
Each man had only one genuine vocation -- to find the way to himself. Now everything changed. My childhood world was breaking apart around me. My parents eyed me with a certain embarrassment. My sisters had become strangers to me. A disenchantment falsified and blunted my usual feelings and joys: the garden lacked fragrance, the woods held no attraction for me, the world stood around me like a clearance sale of last year's secondhand goods, insipid, all its charm gone. Books were so much paper, music a grating noise. That is the way leaves fall around a tree in autumn, a tree unaware of the rain running down its sides, of the sun or the frost, and of life gradually retreating inward.
*The tree does not die. It waits.
*I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult? We create gods and struggle with them, and they bless us.
*If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
*People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.
*The world, as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish -- and it will. But there is no dream that lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular one.
*We can understand each other, but each of us can only interpret himself.

Siddhartha:
*When you throw a rock into the water,it will speed on the fastest course to the bottom of the water. This is how it is when Siddhartha has a goal, a resolution. Siddhartha does nothing, he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he passes through the thingsof the world like a rock through water, without doing anything, without stirring; he is drawn, he lets himself fall. His goal attracts him,because he doesn't let anything enter his soul which might oppose the goal. This is what Siddhartha has learned among the Samanas. This is what fools call magic and of which they think it would be effected by means of the demons. Nothing is effected by demons, there are no demons. Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals, if he is able to think, if he is able to wait, if he is able to fast.
*They knew a tremendous number of things — But was it worthwhile knowing all these things if they did not know the one important thing, the only important thing?
*There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge — that is everywhere, that is Atman, that is in me and you and in every creature, and I am beginning to believe that this knowledge has no worse enemy than the man of knowledge, than learning. Atman is a term used for Hindu and Buddhist concepts of the soul. You are like me; you are different from other people. You are Kamala and no one else, and within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself, just as I can. Few people have that capacity and yet everyone could have it.
*Siddhartha to Kamala -A true seeker could not accept any teachings, not if he sincerely wished to find something. But he who had found, could give his approval to every path, every goal; nothing separated him from all of the other thousands who lived in eternity, who breathed the Divine.
*Although he had reached a high stage of self-discipline and bore his last wound well, he now felt as if these ordinary people were his brothers. Their vanities, desires, and trivialities no longer seemed absurd to him; they had become understandable, lovable, and even worthy of respect. These people were worthy of love and admiration in their blind loyalty, in their blind strength and tenacity. With the exception of one small thing, one tiny little thing, they lacked nothing that the sage and thinker had, and that was the consciousness of the unity of all life. *When Siddhartha listened attentively to this river, to the song of a thousand voices; when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word:Om — perfection. From that hour Siddhartha ceased to fight against his destiny. There shone in his face the serenity of knowledge, of one who is no longer confronted with conflict of desires, who has found salvation, who is in harmony with the stream of events, with the stream of life, full of sympathy and compassion, surrendering himself to the stream, belonging to the unity of all things.
*Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it. Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real. Listen my friend! I am a sinner and you are a sinner, but someday the sinner will be Brahma again, will someday attain Nirvana, will someday become a Buddha. Now this "someday" is illusion; it is only a comparison. The sinner is not on his way to a Buddha-like state; he is not evolving, although our thinking cannot conceive things otherwise. No, the potential Buddha already exists in the sinner; his future is already there. The potential hidden Buddha must be recognized in him, in you, in everybody. The world, Govinda, is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people — eternal life.
*I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of desired imaginary world, some imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to love it and be glad to belong to it. These, Govinda, are some of the thoughts in my mind. Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.
*And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another. Here is a doctrine at which you will laugh. It seems to me, Govinda, that Love is the most important thing in the world. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.

Steppenwolf:
*One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.
*When two cultures collide,it is the only time when true suffering exists.
*I sped through heaven and saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defences and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart. As a body everyone is singe, as a soul never. MAGIC THEATER ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY I tried to open the door, but the heavy old latch would not stir. The display too was over. It had suddenly ceased, sadly convinced of its uselessness. I took a few steps back, landing deep into the mud, but no more letters came. The display was over. For a long time I stood waiting in the mud, but in vain. Then, when I had given up and gone back to the alley, a few colored letters were dropped here and there, reflected on the asphalt in front of me. I read: FOR MADMEN ONLY!
*Haller’s sickness of soul, as I now know, is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs, a sickness, it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless only but rather those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing.
*Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke. A mere nothing suffices- and the lightning strikes.

Narcissus and Goldmund:
*It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement.
*We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do.
*All existance seemed to be based on duality, on contrast. Either one was a man or one was a woman, either a wanderer or sedentary burgher, either a thinking person or a feeling person-no one could breathe in at the same time as he breathed out, be a man as well as a woman, experience freedom as well as order, combine instinct and mind. One always had to pay for one with the loss of the other, and one thing was always just as important and desirable as the other.
*How mysterious this life was, how deep and muddy its waters ran, yet how clear and noble what emerged from them.
***"If I know what love is, it is because of you."
*Without a mother, one cannot love. Without a mother, one cannot die.

The Glass Bead Game:
*There were entertaining, impassioned, or witty lectures on Goethe, say, in which he would be depicted descending from a post chaise wearing a blue frock-coat to seduce some Strassburg or Wetzlar girl; or on Arabic culture; in all of them a number of fashionable phrases were shaken up like dice in a cup and everyone was delighted if he dimly recognized one or two catchwords.
*The "music of decline" had sounded, as in that wonderful Chinese fable; like a thrumming bass on the organ its reverberations faded slowly out over decades; its throbbing could be heard in the corruption of the schools, periodicals, and universities, in melancholia and insanity among those artists and critics who could still be taken seriously; it raged as untrammeled and amateurish overproduction in all the arts. When an orchestra of the Journeyers first publicly performed a suite from the time before Handel completely without crescendi and diminuendi, with the naïveté and chasteness of another age and world, some among the audience are said to have been totally uncomprehending, but others listened with fresh attention and had the impression that they were hearing music for the first time in their lives. In the League's concert hall between Bremgarten and Morbio, one member built a Bach organ as perfectly as Johann Sebastian Bach would have had it built had he had the means and opportunity.
*The young people who now proposed to devote themselves to intellectual studies no longer took the term to mean attending a university and taking a nibble of this or that from the dainties offered by celebrated and loquacious professors who without authority offered them the crumbs of what had once been higher education. Now they had to study just as stringently and methodically as the engineers and technicians of the past, if not more so. They had a steep path to climb, had to purify and strengthen their minds by dint of mathematics and scholastic exercises in Aristotelian philosophy. Moreover, they had to learn to renounce all those benefits which previous generations of scholars had considered worth striving for: rapid and easy money-making, celebrity and public honors, the homage of the newspapers, marriages with daughters of bankers and industrialists, a pampered and luxurious style of life.
*Let us say that the freedom exists, but it is limited to the one unique act of choosing the profession. Afterward all freedom is over. When he begins his studies at the university, the doctor, lawyer, or engineer is forced into an extremely rigid curriculum which ends with a series of examinations. If he passes them, he receives his license and can thereafter pursue his profession in seeming freedom. But in doing so he becomes the slave of base powers; he is dependent on success, on money, on his ambition, his hunger for fame, on whether or not people like him. He must submit to elections, must earn money, must take part in the ruthless competition of castes, families, political parties, newspapers. In return he has the freedom to become successful and well-to-do, and to be hated by the unsuccessful, or vice versa.
*To be capable of everything and do justice to everything, one certainly does not need less spiritual force and èlan and warmth, but more. What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world. Where passion dominates, that does not signify the presence of greater desire and ambition, but rather the misdirection of these qualities toward an isolated and false goal, with a consequent tension and sultriness in the atmosphere. Those who direct the maximum force of their desires toward the center, toward true being, toward perfection, seem quieter than the passionate souls because the flame of their fervor cannot always be seen.
*There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.
*It had its pleasant and flattering side; it satisfied ambition and strengthened self-confidence. But it also had another, a dark and terrifying side. For there was something bad and unpalatable about the attitude one took toward these schoolmates so eager for advice, guidance, and an example, about the impulse to despise them for their lack of self-reliance and dignity, and about the occasional secret temptation to make them (at least in thought) into obedient slaves.
*How alien our country has become from her noblest Province and how unfaithful to that Province's spirit; how far body and soul, ideal and reality have moved apart in our country; how little they know about each other, or want to know.
*It is a pity that you students aren't fully aware of the luxury and abundance in which you live. But I was exactly the same when I was still a student. We study and work, don't waste much time, and think we may rightly call ourselves industrious — but we are scarcely conscious of all we could do, all that we might make of our freedom. Then we suddenly receive a call from the hierarchy, we are needed, are given a teaching assignment, a mission, a post, and from then on move up to a higher one, and unexpectedly find ourselves caught in a network of duties that tightens the more we try to move inside it. All the tasks are in themselves small, but each one has to be carried out at its proper hour, and the day has far more tasks than hours. That is well; one would not want it to be different. But if we ever think, between classroom, archives, secretariat, consulting room, meetings, and official journeys — if we ever think of the freedom we possessed and have lost, the freedom for self-chosen tasks, for unlimited, far-flung studies, we may well feel the greatest yearning for those days, and imagine that if we ever had such freedom again we would fully enjoy its pleasures and potentialities.
*I had tasted the bait and knew that there was nothing more attractive and more subtle on earth than the Game. I had also observed fairly early that this enchanting Game demanded more than naive amateur players, that it took total possession of the man who had succumbed to its magic. And an instinct within me rebelled against my throwing all my energies and interests into this magic forever. Some naive feeling for simplicity, for wholeness and soundness, warned me against the spirit of the Waldzell Vicus Lusorum. I sensed in it a spirit of specialism and virtuosity, certainly highly cultivated, certainly richly elaborated, but nevertheless isolated from humanity and the whole of life — a spirit that had soared too high into haughty solitariness. For years I doubted and probed, until the decision had matured within me and in spite of everything I decided in favor of the Game. I did so because I had within me that urge to seek the supreme fulfillment and serve only the greatest master.
*Ordinarily, when he thought back upon those days, let alone upon his student years and the Bamboo Grove, it had always been as if he were gazing from a cool, dull room out into broad, brightly sunlit landscapes, into the irrevocable past, the paradise of memory. Such recollections had always been, even when they were free of sadness, a vision of things remote and different, separated from the prosaic present by a mysterious festiveness.
*It was as if by becoming a musician and Music Master he had chosen music as one of the ways toward man's highest goal, inner freedom, purity, perfection, and as though ever since making that choice he has done nothing but let himself be more and more permeated, transformed, purified by music — his entire self from his nimble, clever pianist's hands and his vast, well-stocked musician's memory to all the parts and organs of body and soul, to his pulses and breathing, to his sleep and dreaming — so that he was now only a symbol, or rather a manifestation, a personification of music.
*We were picking apart a problem in linguistic history and, as it were, examining close up the peak period of glory in the history of a language; in minutes we had traced the path which had taken it several centuries. And I was powerfully gripped by the vision of transitoriness: the way before our eyes such a complex, ancient, venerable organism, slowly built up over many generations, reaches its highest point, which already contains the germ of decay, and the whole intelligently articulated structure begins to droop, to degenerate, to totter toward its doom. And at the same time the thought abruptly shot through me, with a joyful, startled amazement, that despite the decay and death of that language it had not been lost, that its youth, maturity, and downfall were preserved in our memory, in our knowledge of it and its history, and would survive and could at any time be reconstructed in the symbols and formulas of scholarship as well as in the recondite formulations of the Glass Bead Game. I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.

Unsourced:
*My instinct as an individualist and artist has always warned me most urgently against this capacity of men for becoming drunk on collective suffering, collective pride, collective hatred, and collective honor. When this morbid exaltation becomes perceptible in a room, a hall, a village, a city, or a country, I grow cold and distrustful; a shudder comes over me, for already, while most of my fellow men are still weeping with rapture and enthusiasm, still cheering and venting protestations of brotherhood, I see blood flowing and cities going up in flames.
*My watercolours are a sort of poem or dream, they carry only a distant memory of reality, transforming it according to personal feelings or need.
*That's the way it is when you love. It makes you suffer, and I have suffered much in the years since. But it matters little that you suffer, so long as you feel alive with a sense of the close bond that connects all living things, so long as love does not die! However, I do know that if there is a state of bliss and a paradise, it must be an uninterrupted sequence of such moments, and if this state of bliss can be attained through suffering and dwelling in pain, then no sorrow or pain can be so great that one should seek escape from it.

Kurt Cobain

Nirvana - The Man Who Sold the World!

We passed upon the stair
We spoke of was and when
Although I wasn't there
He said I was his friend
Which came as a surprise
I spoke into his eyes
I thought you died alone
A long long time ago.
Oh no, not me
We never lost control
You're face to face
With The Man Who Sold The World
I laughed and shook his hand
And made my way back home
I searched for form and land
For years and years I roamed
I gazed a gazeless stare
At all the millions here
I must have died alone
A long, long time ago
Who knows?
Not me
We never lost control
You're face to face
With the Man who Sold the World

Jean Paul Sartre

Sartre(the Atheist) seem to have said near his death:

{I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.}

Before this realization,the man and his mental tug of war:

Hell is other people."from No Exit

I agree, I disagree.

Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.


What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?


Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.


Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind. To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.


What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal…. For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space.


The more one is absorbed in fighting evil, the less one is tempted to place the good in question.


NAUSEA

When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell a story: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow by too: you suddenly see people appear who speak and then go away; you plunge into stories of which you can't make head or tail: you'd make a terrible witness.


People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?


I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.


As for the square at Meknes, where I used to go every day, it's even simpler: I do not see it at all anymore. All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words that are indivisibly bound together: a charming square at Meknes. … I don't see anything any more: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction. And we feel that the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations, promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to all that did not herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the man was walking in the night without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of dull rich prizes, and he did not make his choice.


I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.


I wanted for the moments in my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. It would be just as well to try to catch time by the tail. As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.



I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape. The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist. The past is the luxury of proprietors. Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?


On my way to the office in the morning, there are, in front of me, behind me, other men going to their jobs. I see them; if I dared, I would smile at them. I think to myself that I am a socialist, that they are the purpose of my life, of my efforts and that they do not know it yet.



For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.



For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, just notes, a myriad tiny tremors. The notes know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them then destroys them, without ever leaving them the chance to recuperate and exist for themselves.... I would like to hold them back, but I know that, if I succeeded in stopping one, there would only remain in may hand a corrupt and languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even want that death: I know of few more bitter or intense impressions.


All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.



Absurd, irreducible; nothing—not even a profound and secret delirium of nature—could explain [a tree root]. How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?
I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.




BEING AND NOTHINGNESS

Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away.... To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.


I am responsible for everything ... except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being. Therefore everything takes place as if I were compelled to be responsible. I am abandoned in the world ... in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.


Nothingness haunts being.



Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. Life has no meaning a priori … It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose. It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.


The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure nihilation of the In-itself; it is like a hole of being at the heart of Being.


Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not. He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to recover his inner being. All human actions are equivalent ... and ... all are on principle doomed to failure.




THE FLIES

But [your crime] will be there, one hundred times denied, always there, dragging itself behind you. Then you will finally know that you have committed your life with one throw of the die, once and for all, and there is nothing you can do but tug our crime along until your death. Such is the law, just and unjust, of repentance. Then we will see what will become of your young pride.


Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse. Some men are born committed to action: they do not have a choice, they have been thrown on a path, at the end of that path, an act awaits them, their act.


Her face seems ravaged by both lightning and hail. But on yours there is something like the promise of a storm: one day passion will burn it to the bone. I felt less alone when I didn’t know you yet: I was waiting for the other. I thought only of his strength and never of my weakness. And now here you are, Orestes, it was you. I look at you and I see that we are two orphans.


Understand me: I wish to be a man from somewhere, a man among men. You see, a slave, when he passes by, weary and surly, carrying a heavy load, limping along and looking down at his feet, only at his feet to avoid falling down; he is in his town, like a leaf in greenery, like a tree in a forest, argos surrounds him, heavy and warm, full of herself; I want to be that slave, Electra, I want to pull the city around me and to roll myself up in it like a blanket. I will not leave.



Now I am weary and I can no longer tell good from Evil, and I need someone to show me the way.



We were too light, Electra. Now our feet press down in the earth like the wheels of a cart in its groove. Come with me, and we will walk heavily, bending under the weight of our heavy load.




NO EXIT

I will take it all: tongs, molten lead, prongs, garrotes, all that burns, all that tears, I want to truly suffer. Better one hundred bites, better the whip, vitriol, than this suffering in the head, this ghost of suffering which grazes and caresses and never hurts enough.



If we must absolutely mention this state of affairs, I suggest that we call ourselves “absent”, that is more proper.It is better; heavier, crueler. The mouth you wear for hell.


You have stolen my face from me: you know it and I no longer do.



One always dies too soon—or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life. I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.




DIRTY HANDS

They made me take cod liver oil: that is the height of luxury: a medicine to make you hungry while the others, in the street, would have sold themselves for a beefsteak. I saw them passing my window with their signs: “Give me bread”.


I was your luxury. For nineteen years I have been put in your man’s world and was forbidden to touch anything and you made me think that all was going very well and that I did not have to worry about anything but putting flowers in vases. Why did you lie to me? Why did you keep me ignorant, if it was to admit to me one day that this world is cracking and that you are all powerless and to make me choose between a suicide and a murder?



Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.


I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.


As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.



You take souls for vegetables.... The gardener can decide what will become of his carrots but no one can choose the good of others for them.



The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.




THE DEVIL AND THE GOOD LORD

If you are not already dead, forgive. Rancor is heavy, it is worldly; leave it on earth: die light.


If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat. It is not the same thing. You are perhaps not lying, but you are not telling the truth.



I do not understand! I understand nothing! I cannot understand nor do I want to understand! I want to believe! To Believe!


When the rich make war, it's the poor that die.



Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.You see,I divide men into three categories: those who have a lot of money, those who have none at all and those who have a little. The first want to keep what they have: their interest is to maintain order; the second want to take what they do not have: their interest is to destroy the existing order and to establish one which is profitable to them. They each are realist, people with whom one can agree. The third group want to overthrow the social order to take what they do not have, while still preserving it so that no one takes away what they have. Thus, they preserve in fact what they destroy in theory, or they destroy in fact what they seem to preserve. Those are the idealists.


Thus man defines himself in relationship to this ignorance.he defines what he is and what he seeks in terms of it.


If you want to deserve Hell, you need only stay in bed.


The world is iniquity; if you accept it, you are an accomplice, if you change it you are an executioner.



If you die, I will lie down beside you and I will stay there until the end, without eating or drinking, you will rot in my arms and I will love you as carcass: for you love nothing if you do not love everything.



Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.


One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

Thomas Hardy

Moments Of Vision

That mirror
Which makes of men a transparency,
Who holds that mirror
And bids us such a breast-bare spectacle see
Of you and me?
That mirror
Whose magic penetrates like a dart,
Who lifts that mirror
And throws our mind back on us,
and our heart,
until we start?
That mirror
Works well in these night hours of ache;
Why in that mirror
Are tincts we never see ourselves
once take
When the world is awake?
That mirror
Can test each mortal when unaware;
Yea, that strange mirror
May catch his last thoughts,
whole life foul or fair,
Glassing it -- where?

Rumi!

I thought I must give up on life
And turn into a stone;
The desert wind quite suited me:
No heart, no mind–just bone.
I thought it would be dumb to try
To want something again;
Wanting turns to need, and then
Transmogrifies to pain.
I laughed at people still in love
Who trusted someone’s word;
To make my happiness depend
On faith seemed quite absurd.
I lay alone and wonder-struck,
Sleepless in my bed,
Still numb, still dumb,
still ice, ice cold,
Not knowing I was dead.
And then you came and shone upon
My meadow full of snow,
And saw the flowers only love
Could recognize and grow;
And made me feel so beautiful
I shed my cold, cold skin,
And opened up my heart to you,
And, fearful, let you in.
And now, my dear, I am in love,
With all that I’ve been through.
I know the worst of all the world,
And I believe in you!

Pablo Neruda!

Don't Go Far Off, Not Even For A Day !
Don't go far off, not even for a day, because
-- because -- I don't know how to say it:
a day is long and I will be waiting for you,
as in an empty station when the trains
are parked off somewhere else, asleep.
Don't leave me, even for an hour,
because then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift into me,
choking my lost heart.
Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,
because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back?
Will you leave me here, dying?


Thinking, tangling shadows in the deep solitude!
You are far away too, oh farther than anyone.
Thinking, freeing birds, dissolving images,burying lamps.
Belfry of fogs, how far away, up there!
Stifling laments, milling shadowy hopes,taciturn miller,
night falls on you face downward, far from the city.
Your presence is foreign, as strange to me as a thing.I think,
I explore great tracts of my life before you.
My life before anyone, my harsh life.
The shout facing the sea, among the rocks,
running free, mad, in the sea-spray.
The sad rage, the shout, the solitude of the sea.
Headlong, violent, stretched towards the sky.
You, woman, what were you there,
what ray, what vane of that immense fan?
You were as far as you are now.
Fire in the forest! Burn in blue crosses.
Burn, burn, flame up, sparkle in trees of light.
It collapses, crackling. Fire. Fire.
And my soul dances, seared with curls of fire.
Who calls?
What silence peopled with echoes?
Hour of nostalgia, hour of happiness, hour of solitude.
Hour that is mine from among them all!
Megaphone in which the wind passes singing.
Such a passion of weeping tied to my body.
Shaking of all the roots,attack of all the waves!
My soul wandered, happy, sad, unending.
Thinking, burying lamps in the deep solitude.
Who are you, who are you?



On my death!
I like for you to be still
It is as though you are absent
And you hear me from far away
And my voice does not touch you
It seems as though your eyes had flown away
And it seems that a kiss had sealed your mouth
As all things are filled with my soul
You emerge from the things
Filled with my soul
You are like my soul
A butterfly of dream
And you are like the word:
Melancholy
I like for you to be still
And you seem far away
It sounds as though you are lamenting
A butterfly cooing like a dove
And you hear me from far away
And my voice does not reach you
Let me come to be still in your silence
And let me talk to you with your silence
That is bright as a lamp
Simple, as a ring
You are like the night
With its stillness and constellations
Your silence is that of a star
As remote and candid
I like for you to be still
It is as though you are absent
Distant and full of sorrow
So you would've died
One word then,
One smile is enough
And I'm happy;
Happy that it's not true.



Tower Of Light!
O tower of light,
sad beauty
that magnified necklaces
and statues in the sea,
calcareous eye,
insignia of the vast waters,
cry of the mourning petrel,
tooth of the sea,
wife of the Oceanian wind,
O separate rose
from the long stem
of the trampled bush
that the depths,
converted into archipelago,
O natural star,
green diadem,
alone in your lonesome dynasty,
still unattainable,
elusive,
desolate
like one drop,
like one grape,
like the sea.



Love Sonnet XVII !
I do not love you as if you were a salt rose, or topaz
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
So I love you because I know no other way than this:
where I does not exist,
nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.