In his youth when he was poor and had difficulty in earning his bread, he preferred to go hungry and in torn clothes rather than endanger his narrow limit of independence. He never sold himself for mo...
In any case I fully endorse the singer's attitude towards the booklet that he will write and the child he wishes to educate, for not only am I familiar with the passion for education but the desire to...
If I were poet now, I would not resist the temptation to trace my life back through the delicate shadows of my childhood to the precious and sheltered sources of my earliest memories. But these posses...
I'm going nowhere. I'm just travelling. I'm on a pilgrimage.
I would lie for hours by the window gazing down upon the black lake and up at the mountains silhouetted against the wan sky, with stars suspended above. Then a fearfully sweet, overpowering emotion wo...
I will not pretend to justify this espionage I carried on, and I will say openly that all these signs of a life full of intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly at the same time,...
I was an unusual young man then, around eighteen years old - precocious in a hundred ways but very far behind and helpless in a hundred other ways. When I compared myself to other people my age, as I...
I wanted to say a prayer and tried hard to remember one, but all I could think of was silly phrases such as 'Dear Sir' and 'Under the Circumstances'. In my sadness and confusion I mumbled those.
I suddenly saw how sad and artificial my life had been during this period, for the loves, friends, habits and pleasures of these years were discarded like badly fitting clothes. I parted from them wit...
I shall no longer be instructed by the Yoga Veda or the Aharva Veda, or the ascetics, or any other doctrine whatsoever. I shall learn from myself, be a pupil of myself; I shall get to know myself, the...
I saw these passionate people reel about and drift haphazardly as if driven by a storm, the man filled with desire today, satiated on the morrow, loving fiercely and discarding brutally, sure of no af...
I pondered my friend's words. I liked best what he had said about the fireballs since I myself often had the same feeling. The quiet spell of the colored flame, rising into the darkness and all too so...
I have never seen a man look and smile, sit and walk like that, he thought. I, also, would like to look and smile, sit and walk like that, so free, so worthy, so restrained, so candid, so childlike an...
I had made my mind up to stay at the top of the class and [...] graduate at the head of it. […] that was my kind of ideal. I just didn't know any better.
I don't know much about him. He is a carver in our bishop's city, a days journey from here; he has a great reputation as an artist. Artists usually are no saints, he's probably no saint either, but he...
How unusually beautiful the forest was in the morning without anyone walking through it but him, column after column of spruce, a vast hall with a blue-green vault.
How foolish it is to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence.
His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands and thousands.
He saw mankind going through life in a childlike manner... which he loved but also despised.... He saw them toiling, saw them suffering, and becoming gray for the sake of things which seemed to him to...
He loved that anxiety, that terrible and oppressive anxiety which he experienced during the game of dice, during the suspense of high stakes.