Source: Demian (1919), p. 9 Prologue
Context: I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams — like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.
Each man's life represents the road toward himself, and attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. Yet each one strives to become that — one in an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best he can.
“There are ever two ways of striving to fill one's place in the world: one is by seeking to prove one's self useful; the other, by striving to render one's self useless. The first way is the commoner and the more attractive; the second is the rarer and more noble.”
Quoted by by Richard Foster in Renovare' perspective, Vol. 7, No.2, April, 1997.
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Henry Clay Trumbull 15
Union Army chaplain 1830–1903Related quotes
Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature, Paul & Co Pub Consortium, June, 1978.
Source: Introduction to Fichte's Science of Knowledge (1797/1798), p. 17-18.
Source: The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981), Chapter 5, Reason And Genes, p. 145
Indian Spirituality and Life (1919)
Context: Differences of credal belief are to the Indian mind nothing more than various ways of seeing the one Self and Godhead in all. Self-realisation is the one thing needful; to open to the inner Spirit, to live in the Infinite, to seek after and discover the Eternal, to be in union with God, that is the common idea and aim of religion, that is the sense of spiritual salvation, that is the living Truth that fulfils and releases. This dynamic following after the highest spiritual truth and the highest spiritual aim are the uniting bond of Indian religion and, behind all its thousand forms, its one common essence.
The Emperor's Old Clothes
Context: There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. It demands the same skill, devotion, insight, and even inspiration as the discovery of the simple physical laws which underlie the complex phenomena of nature.
Referring to his rival Raymond Poincaré, as quoted in Paris 1919 : Six Months That Changed the World (2003) by Margaret MacMillan, p. 33