So you can't dance? Not at all? Not even one step? How can you say that you've taken any trouble to live when you won't even dance?

Every important cultural gesture comes down to a morality, a model for human behavior concentrated into a gesture.

You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves.

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.

The world, as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish — and it will.

To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do.

Siddhartha has one single goal-to become empty, to become empty of thirst, desire, dreams, pleasure and sorrow-to let the Self die. No longer to be Self, to experience the peace of an emptied heart, to experience pure thought-that was his goal.