What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world.
To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, young man, and possibly a tragic one.
Those who direct the maximum force of their desires toward the center, toward true being, toward perfection, seem quieter than the passionate souls because the flame of their fervor cannot always be seen.
There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist.
The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.
The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.
It was lovely, and tempting, to exert power over men and to shine before others, but power also had its perditions and perils.
It is a pity that you students aren’t fully aware of the luxury and abundance in which you live.
In the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.
For although in a certain sense and for light-minded persons non-existent things can be more easily and irresponsibly represented in words than existing things, for the serious and conscientious historian it is just the reverse.
Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense.
Every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge.