O carte – esență. Îți ghidează conștiința și îți conturează înțelepciune în goluri. Spiritual și cu accent pe suflet.

Câteva fragmente smulse dintre rânduri, așa cum sunt, pentru că traducerea înseamnă fractură de sens:

• Who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?
• Alone and without his nest shall the eagle fly across the sun.
• These things he said in words. But much in his heart remained unsaid. For he himself could not speak his deeper secret.
• Suffer not yet our eyes to hunger for your face.
• And ever has it been that love knows not its on depth until the hour of separation.
• When love beckons to you follow him, though his ways are hard and steep.
• For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.
• Love possesses not nor would it be possessed.
• Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
• Let there be spaces in your togetherness.
• Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
• Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
• And stand together yet not too near together. For the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
• Children: you may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts.
• You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
• You give but little give when you give of your possessions.
• It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.
• For what are your possessions but things you keep in guard for fear you may need them tomorrow?
• And what is fear of need but need itself?
• There are those who give little of the much which they have – and they give it for recognition and their hidden desire makes their gifts unwholesome.
• And there are those who have little and give it all.
• These are the believers in life and the bounty of life, and their coffer is never empty.
• And there are those who give and know not pain in giving, nor they seek joy, nor give mindfulness of virtue.
• Through the hands of such of these God speaks, and from behind their eyes He smiles upon the earth.
• It is well to give when asked, but it is better to give unasked, through understanding.
• Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune. But I say to you that when you work you fulfill a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born, and in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life.
• Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
• The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
• When you are sorrowfull, look again in your heart, and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
• Some of you say „Joy is greater than sorrow”, and others say „Nay, sorrow is greater”. But I say unto you, they are inseparable. Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
• Your house is your larger body. It grows in the sun and sleeps in the stilness of the night; and it is not dreamless. Does not your house dream, and dreaming, leave the city for grove or hilltop?
• Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, the stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then become a host, and then a master?
• Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the unbeautiful.
• And though you seek in garments the freedom of privacy you may find in them a harness and a chain.
• Before you leave the market-place, see that no one has gone his way with empty hands.
• It is when your spirit goes wandering upon the wind, that you, alone and unguarded, commit a wrong unto others and therefore unto yourself.
• Much in you is still man, and much in you is not yet man, but a shapeless pigmy that walks asleep in the mist searching for its own awakening.
• But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you, so the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.
• And as a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree, so the wrong doer cannot do wrong without the hidden will of you all.
• And how shall you punish those whose remorse is already greater than their misdeeds?
• Yet you cannot lay remorse upon the innocent nor lift it from the heart of the guilty.
• The erect and the fallen are but one man standing in twilight between the night of his pigmy –self and the day of his god-self.
• You delight in laying down laws, yet you delight more in breaking them, like children playing by the ocean who build sand-towers with constancy and then destroy them with laughter.
• But while you build your sand-towers the ocean brings more sand to the shore, and when you destroy them the ocean laughs with you.
• What of the cripple who hates dancers?
• What shall I say of these save that they too stand in the sunlight, but with their backs to the sun? They only see their shadows, and their shadows are their laws. And what is the sun to them but a caster of shadows?
• And what is it to acknowledge the laws but to stop down and trace their shadows upon the earth?
• You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care nor your nights without a want and a grief, but rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound.
• For how can a tyrant rule the free and the proud, but for tyranny in their own freedom and a shame in their own pride?
• And if it is a fear you would dispel, the seat of that fear is in your heart and not in the hand of the feared.
• Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgement wage war against your passion and your appetite.
• For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
• Your pain is the breaking of the shell that endoses your understanding.
• Much of your pain is self-chosen.
• And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line. For self is a sea boundless and measureless.
• Say not, “I have found the truth”, but rather “I have found a truth”.
• No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
• For the vision of man lends not its wings to another man.
• Your friend is your needs answered.
• And let your best be your friend.
• For it is his (your friend) to fill your needs, but not your emptiness.
• For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.
• You talk when you cease to be in peace with your thoughts.
• And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.
• And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.
• There are those who have the truth within them, but they tell it not in your words.
• The timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness and knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.
• And let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing.
• Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil. For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?
• You are good when you are one with yourself. Yet when you are not one with yourself you are not evil.
• You are good when you strive to give of yourself.
• You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might also pray also in the fulness of your joy and in your days of abundance.
• Beauty is not a need but an ecstasy. It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand streched forth but rather a heart inflamed and a soul enchanted. It is not the image you see nor the song you would hear, but rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.
• Beauty is life when life unveils her holy face. But you are life and you are the veil. Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror.
• And if you would know God, be not therefore a solver of riddles. Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children. And look into space; you shall see Him walking in the cloud, outstreching His arms in the lightning and descending in rain. You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees.
• You would kow the secret of death. But how shall you find it unless you seek in the heart of life?
• Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
• Was it I who spoke? Was I not also a listener?
• Man’s needs change, but not his love, nor his desire that his love should satisfy his needs.
• What is word knowledge but a shadow of wordless knowledge?
• And I the believer was also the doubter.
• You are not enclosed within your bodies, nor confined to houses or fields.
• Which seems more feeble and bewildered in you is the strongest and most determined.
• And is it not a dream which none of you remember having dreamt, that built your city and fashioned all there is in it?

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