Nature cannot suffer the human form within her system of laws. When given to her charge, the human being before us is reduced to dust. Ours is the most perfect form to be found on earth. The visible world sustains us until life leaves, and then it must utterly destroy us.
I believed that higher knowledge was shared out among all human beings. What else was there to hold us together but this force hidden behind daily consciousness?
There were no redeemers in the streets, no guides, no confessors, comforters, enlighteners, communicants to turn to. You had to take teaching wherever you could find it.
He saw death as a magnetic field that every living thing must enter. He was ready for it. He had even thought that since he had been unconscious under the respirator for an entire month, he might just as well have died in the hospital and avoided further trouble.
Gone, those times. Closed, sealed, and gone.
Yellow dust was dropping from the lime trees, and wild roses grew on the trunks of the apple trees. Pale red, gorged red, fiery, aching, harsh as anger, sweet as drugs.
There was some truth in that. Then I didn’t feel like drowning.
Africa reached my feelings right away even in the air, from which it looked like the ancient bed of mankind.
Of course, in an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too.
Lily blamed her mother for her father’s death. And what was I, the instrument of her anger?
But there comes a day, there always comes a day of tears and madness.
You know, compassion is useless, too, sometimes I feel. It just lasts long enough to get you in dutch.
And at a height of three miles, sitting above the clouds, I felt like an airborne seed.
A student of the mind once explained to me that if you inflict your anger on inanimate things, you not only spare the living, as a civilized man ought to do, but you get rid of the bad stuff in you.
The light in her face turned fine as pearl.
I used to want to be understood, but I guess a person must try to live without being understood. Maybe it’s a sin to want to be understood.
The earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts.
There's hope for you. You don't really want to destroy yourself.
In here, the human bosom—mine, yours, everybody's—there isn't just one soul. There's a lot of souls. But there are two main ones, the real soul and a pretender soul.