Quotes from book

The Magus

“You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.”

“Between skin and skin, there is only light.”

“I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.”

“There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.”

“I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness, to death.”

“The dead live."
"How do they live?"
"By love.”

“It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.”

“The world began in hazard and will end in it.”

“There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be. You are too young to know this. You are still becoming. Not being.”

“Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.”

“To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.”

“Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.”

“Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.”

“… all cynicism masks a failure to cope.”

“The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?”

“Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.'
To live alone?'
To live. With what you are.”

“If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today.”

“He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.”

“The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.”