You've come to know the fortunate and the inauspicious stars, but you don't know whether you yourself are fortunate or lucky.

If you are looking for a friend who is faultless, you will be friendless.

Feeling lonely and ignoble indicates that you haven't been patient.

The friend who knows a lot more than you do will bring difficulties, and grief, and sickness, as medicine, as happiness, as the essence of the moment when you're beaten when you hear Checkmate, and can finally say, I trust you to kill me.

Stay in the spiritual fire. Let it cook you.

What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle.

There is an unseen sweetness in the stomach’s emptiness. We are lutes. When the sound box is filled, no music can come forth. When the brain and the belly burn from fasting, every moment a new song rises out of the fire. The mists clear, and a new vitality makes you spring up the steps before you . . .