For the first time in my life I tasted death, and death tasted bitter, for death is birth, is fear and dread of some terrible renewal.

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

When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured.

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.

Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself....His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness.

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.

Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.