True teachers use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create bridges of their own.
Life is a crusade in the service of God. Whether we wished to or not, we set out as crusaders to free - not the Holy Sepulcher - but that God buried in matter and in our souls.
The human soul is heavy, clumsy, held in the mud of the flesh. Its perceptions are still coarse and brutish. It can divine nothing clearly, nothing with certainty.
All my life, I struggled to stretch my mind to the breaking point, until it began to creak, in order to create a great thought which might be able to give a new meaning to life, a new meaning to death, and to console mankind.
A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible men, men who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death.
Every man is half God, half man; he is both spirit and flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed: It is universal.
The masses do not see the Sirens. They do not hear songs in the air. Blind, deaf, stooping, they pull at their oars in the hold of the earth. But the more select, the captains, harken to a Siren within them... and royally squander their lives with her.
In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls.
I felt deep within me that the highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge or Virtue or Goodness or Victory but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!
The real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darkness.
Throughout my life my greatest benefactors have been my dreams and my travels; very few men, living or dead, have helped me in my struggle.
I fight to embrace the entire circle of human activity to the full extent of my ability.
Tell me what you do with the food you eat, and I'll tell you who you are. Some turn their food into fat and manure, some into work and good humour, and others, I'm told, into God. So there must be three sorts of men.
Beauty is merciless. You do not look at it, it looks at you and does not forgive.
In order to mount to the Cross, the summit of sacrifice, and to God, the summit of immateriality, Christ passed through all the stages which the man who struggles passes through.
The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.
Let your youth have free reign. It won't come again, so be bold, and no repenting.
A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.
I knew that no matter what door you knock on in a Cretan village, it will be opened for you. A meal will be served in your honor, and you will sleep between the best sheets in the house. In Crete, the stranger is still the unknown god. Before him, all doors and all hearts are opened.
God hates a half-devil ten times more than an arch-devil!
