We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.

Which of course is followed by: For those who have Awareness, a hint is quite enough. For the multitudes of heedless mere knowledge is useless. Haji Bektash Veli We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book. Everything that seemed to fill them full for others we pushed aside, because it stood between us and the pleasures of the Gods.

Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.

And wasn't my mind also like another crib in the depths of which I felt I remained ensconced, even in order to watch what was happening outside? When I saw an external object, my awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, lining it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever directly touching its substance; it would volatize in some way before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought near a wet object never touches its moisture because it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation.

The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.