The body’s pain is so paper-thin and insignificant compared to that of the mind.

Basker possesses three kinds of bite: a snap, a nip, and then something like a buzz saw and an angle grinder mounted on a bear trap.

… Because one who seeks the highest must not leave any path untried.

The greatest performances where when fingertips took away a very thin veil between people and uncovered the universe in its entirety.

I’ve had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I’m also helpless in two or three other languages.

When my mother didn’t come back I realized that any moment could be the last. Nothing in life should simply be a passage from one place to another. Each walk should be taken as if...

No matter how close people get, they never reach each other. Including us now. Even now, there’s a place where each of us is alone.

There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language. At some point understanding may come. It will always be wordless. The...

Maybe it’s wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love...

It’s these small differences in people’s karma that determine if we get up or remain lying on the ground.

Deep within every blind, absolute love grows a hatred toward the beloved, who now holds the only existing key to happiness

It may be necessary to stand on the outside of one is to see things clearly.

We think there are limits to the dimensions of fear. Until we encounter the unknown. Then we can all feel boundless amounts of terror.

On closer examination, we are simply a banal tragedy spread over two generations.

Do you know what the foundation of mathematics is?” I ask. “The foundation ofmathematics is numbers. If anyone asked me what makes me truly happy, I wouldsay: numbers. Snow and ice and numbers. And do...

Insgeheim wächst in jeder blinden, kopflosen Verliebtheit der Hass auf den Geliebten, der den einzigen Schlüssel zum Glück besitzt.

The fear for oneself, that one can do something about. Upon it one can turn the light of awareness. But when one is no longer worrying about oneself, then the fear comes for other people...

A child who is born is something to seek out, something to search for, a star, a northern light, a column of energy in the universe. And a child who dies-that’s an abomination.

Grief is a gift, something you have to earn.

deep inside I know that trying to figure things out leads to blindness, that the desire to understand has a built-in brutality that erases what you seek to comprehend. Only experience is sensitive.

Under certain circumstances the fateful decisions in life, sometimes even in matters of life and death, are made with an almost indifferent ease. While the little things-for instance, the way people hang on to what...

Around a child, people come and go, objects appear and are taken away, surroundings take shape and disintegrate. And no explanation is given, because how can you explain the world to a child?So she had...

To want to understand is an attempt to recapture something we have lost.

Whining is a virus, a lethal, infectious, epidemic disease.

Back then I could not understand one word of what I read.Reading did, however, give me heart. Even if you cannot understand what you are reading you can get something from books.

Wie so oft erhebt sich die Frage, weshalb Männer in ihrer Persönlichkeit oft diffus sind, wie es sein kann, daß sie an einem Obduktionstisch, in einer Küche, hinter einem Hundeschlitten virtuose Equilibristen sein können, während...

Das ist eine der anstrengenderen Seiten von Moritz, die er mit dem Alter entwickelt hat – die Mischung aus Perfidie und Sentimentalität.

One should be good to oneself. Especially when one is alone.

When you’re young, you think that sex is the culmination of intimacy. Later you discover that it’s barely the beginning.

With age I have voluntarily chosen certain limitations. I don’t have the energy to start over again. To learn new skills or fight my own personality or figure out diesel engines.

No person can open another person, All we can do is wait. And then work with the openness when it occur.s.

Cantor illustrated the concept of infinity for his students by telling them that there was once a man who had a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and the hotel was fully occupied. Then...

He has a light, fumbling brutality, which several times makes me think that this time it’ll cost me my sanity. In our dawning, mutual intimacy, I induce him to open the little slit in the...

The great systems that inform the world about the truth and life invariably claim to be absolutely truthful and well-balanced. In reality they are quaking bridges built out of yearning.

Do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? … The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something.

Every theoretical explanation is a reduction of intuition.

We all try to camouflage the monotony, But it takes a lot of energy. To insist on being special all the time. When we’re so much like one another anyway. Our triumphs are the same....

Love has something to do with recognition, We can be fascinated by the unknown, we can be attracted by it, but love is something that grows, slowly, in an atmosphere of trust.

There is a pleasant firmness of tone when one is in harmony with oneself. Even when it’s a weak ethic one is resonating with.

The motive for our actions doesn’t lie ahead of us. It’s something behind us that we’re trying to escape.