Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate this very hour, and he stopped suffering.

To recognize causes is to think, and through thought alone feelings become knowledge and are not lost, but become real and begin to mature.

"You do not really love me — you love nobody. Is that not true?" "Maybe," said Siddhartha wearily. "I am like you. You cannot love either, otherwise how could you practice love as an art? Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can — that is their secret."

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves.

It was the first rent in the holy image of my father, it was the first fissure in the columns that had upheld my childhood, which every individual must destroy before he can become himself.

In any case, the most lively young people become the best old people, not those who pretend to be as wise as grandfathers while they are still at school.