How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people...
Bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal: I find all this in myself, more or less, according as I turn myself about; and whoever will sift himself to the bottom, will find...
When we say, “You are nothing else than your life,” that does not imply that the artist will be judged solely on the basis of his works of art; a thousand other things will contribute toward summing him up. What we mean is that a...
In a work like Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein was alert to the difference between real questions and phoney ones. A piece of language can have the grammatical form of a question but not actually be one. Or our grammar can misleadus into mistaking one kind of proposition...
Once upon a time there was a bird which did not have the power of flight. Like a chicken, he walked about on the ground, although he knew that some birds did fly. It so happened that, through a combination of circum- stances, the egg of a flying bird...
At some point in life—sometimes in youth, sometimes late—each of us is due to awaken to our mortality. There are so many triggers: a glance in a mirror at your sagging jowls, graying hair, stooping shoulders. The march of birthdays, especially those round decades—fifty, sixty, seventy; Meeting...
You succeeded - and I have said again and again that nothing fails like success. You have reached a place that you wanted to reach, but you were not aware of the by-products. You have millions of dollars, but you cannot sleep. When Alexander was in India he...
One day Zorba says to his master—which is Kazantzakis himself—‘Master, there is only one thing wrong with you: you think too much. You come with me.’ It was a full-moon night. Kazantzakis tried—‘No, no. What are you doing?’ But Zorba pulled him out to the...
Once upon a time Khidr, the teacher of Moses, called upon mankind with a war- ing. At a certain date. he said, all the water in the world which had not been specially hoarded, would disap- pear. It would then be renewed, with different water,...
A king was very much impressed by the simple and innocent life of a Buddhist monk. Slowly slowly he accepted him as his master. He watched - he was a very calculating man - he inquired about his character: "Is there any loophole in his life?" When...
