Meteora, Greece - 20071. “After all, every neatly solved problem in mathematics could provide intellectual pleasure; every good piece of music could exalt and expand the soul toward universality when heard, and even more when played; and every reverent meditation could soothe the heart and tune it to harmony with the universe. But perhaps for that very reason, my doubts whispered, the Glass Bead Game was merely a formal art, a clever skill, a witty combination, so that it would be better not to play this Game, but to occupy oneself with uncontaminated mathematics and good music.”
2. “All gods and devils that have ever existed are within us.”
3. “All higher humor begins with ceasing to take oneself seriously.”
4. “All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.”
5. "A magic dwells in each beginning and protecting us it tells us how to live."
6. “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.”
7. “As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.”
8. “At other times he might forget everything and daydream with a new softness and surrender, listen to the wind or the rain, gaze into the chalice of a flower or the moving waters of the river, understanding nothing, divining everything, lost in sympathy, curiosity, the craving to comprehend, carried away from his own self toward another, toward the world, toward the mystery and sacrament, the at once painful and lovely disporting of the world of appearances.”
9. “A writer does not want the path of the many, but obstinately only his own path; he does not want to run with the pack and adapt himself, but to reflect nature and world in his own soul, experiencing them in fresh images. He is not made for life in the collective but is a solitary king in a dream world of his own creation.”
10. “But never forget what I have told you so often: our mission is to recognize contraries for what they are: first of all as contraries, but then as opposite poles of a unity.”
11. “Do we live to abolish death? No -- we live to fear it and then again to love it, and just for death's sake it is that our spark of life glows for an hour now and then so brightly.”
12. “Each man has only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself. His task is to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else is only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity; and fear of one's inwardness.”
13. “...each of us has to find out for himself what is permitted and what is forbidden - forbidden for him. It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard. And vice versa. Actually it's only a question of convenience. Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them; things are forbidden to them that every honorable man will do any day in the year and other things are allowed to them that are generally despised. Each person must stand on his own feet.”
14. “Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.”
15. “Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.”
16. “Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.”
17. “Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth ot a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly 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 if forever being created.”
18. “Faith and doubt go hand in hand, they are complementaries. One who never doubts will never truly believe.”
19. "For even the most childish intoxication with progress will soon be forced to recognize that writing and books have a function that is eternal. It will become evident that formulations in words and the handling on of these formulations through writing are not only important aids but actually the only means by which humanity can have a history and continuing consciousness of itself."
20. “… For although in a certain sense and for light-minded persons non-existent things can be more easily and irresponsably represented in words than existing things, for the serious and conscientions historian it is just the reverse. Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them to a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.”
21. “He had thought more than other men, and in matters of the intellect he had that calm objectivity, that certainty of thought and knowledge, such as only really intellectual men have, who have no axe to grind, who never wish to shine, or to talk others down, or to always appear in the right.”
22. “History, after all, consists of an unbroken sucession of rulers, leaders, bosses and commanders who with extremely rare exceptions had all begun well and ended badly. All of them, at least so they said, had striven for power for the sake of the good; afterward they had become obsessed and numbed by power and loved it for its own sake.”
23. “His was the typical development of every noble mind; working and growing harmoniously and at the same tempo, the inner self and the outer world approached each other.”
24. "I am fond of music. I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable."
25. “I believe that the struggle against death, the undconditional and self-willed determination to live, is the motive power behind the lives and activities of all outstanding men.”
26. "If I know what love is, it is because of you."
27. “If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.”
28. "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."
29. "I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value."
30. “I have known it for a long time but I have only just experienced it. Now I know it not only with my intellect, but with my eyes, with my heart, with my stomach.”
31. “In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified.”
32. “In the course of time I was more and more conscious, too, that this affliction was not due to any defects of nature but rather to a profusion of gifts and powers which had not attained to harmony.”
33. "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 symbol 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 truly 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.”
34. “It is treason to sacrifice love of truth, intellectual honesty, loyalty to the laws and methods of the mind, to any other interests, including those of one's country. Whenever propaganda and conflict of interests threatens to devalue, distort, and do violence to the truth...it is our duty to resist and save the truth, since that is the supreme article of our creed. The scholar who knowingly speaks, writes, or teaches falsehood, who knowingly supports lies and deceptions, not only violates organic principles. He also, no matter how things may seem at the given moment, does his people a grave disservice.”
35. “Joseph devoted his free time during that year chiefly to the Glass Bead Game, which enthralled him more and more. A notebook of jottings from that period, dealing with the meaning and theory of the Game, begins with the sentence: "The whole of both physical and mental life is a dynamic phenomenon, of which the Glass Bead Game basically comprehends only the aesthetic side, and does so predominantly as an image of rhythmic processes."”
36. “Like all true values, love cannot be bought. Pleasure can be bought, but not love.”
37. "Love is stronger than violence."
38. “`Man', whatever people think of him, is never anything more than a temporary bourgeois compromise. Convention rejects and bans certain of the more naked instincts, a little consciousness, morality and debestialization is called for, and a modicum of spirit is not only permitted but even though necessary.”
39. "Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them."
40. “Nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.”
41. “One can be a strict logician or grammarian, and at the same time full of imagination and music.”
42. "One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time."
43. "Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin."
44. “Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists in putting too high a value on time. In eternity there is no time. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.”
45. “She was the one window, the one tiny crack of light in my black hole of dread.”
46. “”Should we be mindful of dreams?” Joseph asked. “Can we interpret them?” The Master looked into his eyes and said teserly: “We should be mindful of everything, for we can interpret everything.””
47. ”The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.”
48. “The devil is the spirit, and we are his unhappy children.”
49. "The game as I conceive it," Knecht once wrote, "leaves (the player) with the feeling that he has extracted from the universe of accident and confusion a totally symmetrical and harmonious cosmos, and absorbed it into himself.
50. “The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen.”
51. “The images of many women floated by me with an unearthly fragrance like moist sea flowers on the surface of the water. Women whom I had loved, desired and sung, whose love I had seldom won and seldom striven to win... These pictures -- there were hundreds of them, with names and without -- all came back. They rose fresh and new out of this night of love, and I knew again, what in my wretchedness I had forgoteen, that they were my life's possession and all its worth.”
52. "The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by the subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure."
53. “There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.”
54. "There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself."
55. "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."
56. “These rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts, but especially mathematics and music (and/ or musicology), and capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, and all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property---on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ.”
57. "This same eternal idea, which for us has been embodied in the Glass Bead Game, has underlain every movement of Mind toward the ideal goal of a Universitatis Litterarum, every Platonic Academy, every league of an intellectual elite, every rapprochement between the exact and the more liberal disciplines, every effort toward reconciliation between science and art or science and religion."
58. “To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, young man, and possibly a tragic one.”
59. "To the one who finds the way to the inside, to the one who is fallen enthusiastic in self-stagnancy, to the one who has slightly acquainted with realization which the idea of mind is anything just chosen by a configuration ot a metaphor of god and world, the root of wisdom is talking,according to god and world, with self-inside."
60. “Truth is lived, not taught.”
61. “...we are all dreaming of a speech without words that utters the inexpressible and gives form to the formless.”
62. “… we must not forget that the writing of history – however dryly it is done, sincere the desire for objectivity – remains literature. History´s third dimension is always fiction.”
63. “What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men – each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.”
64. “When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.”
65. “Wisdom is not communicable....Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”
66. “Words are really a mask. They rarely express the true meaning: in fact, they tend to hide it.”
67. “Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.”
68. "Yes Siddhartha," he said. "Is this what you mean? That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the waterfalls, at the ferry,... and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future?" / "That is it," said Siddhartha, "And when I learned that, I re- viewed my life and it was also a river, and Siddhartha the boy, Siddhartha the mature man, and Siddhartha the old man were only separated by shadows, not through reality. Siddhartha's previous lives were also not in the past, and his death and return to Brahma are not in the future. Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence."
69. "You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves."
70. "You are to live and to learn to laugh. You are to learn to listen to the cursed radio music of life and to reverence the spirit behind it and to laugh at its distortions. So there you are. More will not be asked of you."
71. “You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. That is the prison where you lie.”
72. "You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else."
73. "You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present."
