This is the first teaching of the Knights: You will erase everything you had written in the book of your life up until now: restlessness, uncertainty, lies. And in the place of all this you will write the word courage.
When I had nothing more to lose, I was given everything. When I ceased to be who I am, I found myself. When I experienced humiliation and yet kept on walking, I understood that I was free to choose my destiny.
You need to change yourself. The moment that you change yourself it is a gigantic step. And this is what I do. The book is much more important than the writer.
You have two types of writers: one like Proust who was locked in his room and wrote the masterpiece. And the other type was Hemingway who celebrated life and also wrote a masterpiece.
making a decision was only the beginning of things. When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.
For a writer you have to be interested in different cultures, different backgrounds. You are not there to write only about your village. You're there to show a bit of your village, but also to understand other villages.
Why do they make things so complicated?" "So that those who have the responsibility for understanding can understand.," he said. "Imagine if everyone went around transforming lead into gold. Gold would lose its value." "It's those who are persistent, and willing to study things deeply, who achieve the Master Work.
The roller-coaster is my life; life is a fast, dizzying game; life is a parachute jump; it’s taking chances, falling over and getting up again; it’s mountaineering; it’s wanting to get to the very top of yourself and feeling angry and dissatisfied when you don’t manage it
The dangers is that every religion, including the Catholic one, says "I have the ultimate truth." Then you start to rely on the priest, the mullah, the rabbi, or whoever, to be responsible for your acts. In fact, you are the only one who is responsible.