The river taught us how to listen with a silent heart, with a waiting open soul.

You wouldn't consider all the bipeds you pass on the street human beings simply because they walk upright and carry their young in their bellies nine months! It is obvious how many of them are fish or sheep, worms or angels, how many are ants, how many are bees!

I will not pretend to justify this espionage I carried on, and I will say openly that all these signs of a life full of intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly at the same time, inspired me at first with aversion and mistrust. I am not only a middle-class man, living a regular life, fond of work and punctuality; I am also an abstainer and a nonsmoker, and these bottles in Haller's room pleased me even less than the rest of his artistic disorder.

I have no desire to walk on water," said Siddhartha. "Let the old shamans satisfy themselves with such skills".

...and the vessel was not full, his intellect was not satisfied, his soul was not at peace, his heart was not still.

Every sin already carries grace within in, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people - eternal life. The Buddha exists in the robber and dice player; the robber exists in the Brahmin.

A tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me!... Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.