I felt knowledge and the unity of the world circulate in me like my own blood.

What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life

We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.

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.

Did all this make sense?

You show the world as a complete, unbroken chain, an eternal chain, linked together by cause and effect.

That's the way it is when you love. It makes you suffer, and I have suffered much in the years since. But it matters little that you suffer, so long as you feel alive with a sense of the close bond that connects all living things, so long as love does not die!