The warrior knows that he is free to choose his desires, and he makes these decisions with courage, detachment, and - sometimes - with just a touch of madness.
Each human being has the right to seek out joy, joy being understood as something which makes one content - not necessarily that which makes others content.
I am in the Aleph, the point at which everything is in the same place at the same time. I'm at a window, looking out at the world and its secret places, poetry lost in time and words left hanging in space...sentences that are perfectly understood, even when left unspoken. Feelings that simultaneously exalt and suffocate.
When we are high up, everything looks very small.
Our glories and our sadnesses cease to be important.
We have left whatever we won or lost down below.
From the top of a mountain you can see
how large the world is and how wide the horizon.
Stop turning on your emotional television to watch the same program over & over again, the one that shows how much you suffered from a certain loss: that is only poisoning you, nothing else.
Beauty is present in all creation, but the danger lies in the fact that we allow ourselves to be influenced by what people think. We deny our own beauty because others can't or won't recognize it. We try to imitate what we see around us. We try to be what other people think of as 'pretty' & little by little, our soul fades. We forget the world is what we imagine it to be. We stop being the sun and become, instead, the pool of water reflecting it.
What made you fall in love with a prostitute?” “I didn’t understand it myself at the time. But I’ve thought about it since, and I think it was because, knowing that your body would never be mine alone, I had to concentrate on conquering your soul.
I’ve been through all this before,’ he says to his heart. “ ‘Yes, you have been through all this before,’ replies his heart. ‘But you have never been beyond it.