“For a country without a past is nothing, a word That, hardly spoken, loses its meaning, A perishable wall destroyed by flame, An echo of animal emotions.”

A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death – the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.

Forget the suffering You caused others. Forget the suffering Others caused you. The waters run and run, Springs sparkle and are done, You walk the earth you are forgetting.

From life, from the apple cut by the flaming knife, what grain will be saved? My son, believe me, nothing remains, Only adult toil, the furrow of fate in the palm. Only toil, Nothing more.

When I die, I will see the lining of the world. The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.

Consciousness even in my sleep changes primary colors. The features of my face melt like a wax doll in the fire. And who can consent to see in the mirror the mere face of man?

On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net.

He returns years later, has no demands. He wants only one, most precious thing: To see, purely and simply, without name, Without expectations, fears, or hopes, At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.

When I curse Fate, it’s not me, but the earth in me.

I think that I am here, on this earth, to present a report on it, but to whom I don’t know. As if I were sent so that whatever takes place has meaning because it changes into memory.

The soul exceeds its circumstances.

Love means to look at yourself The way one looks at distant things For you are only one thing among many.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy, Repeats while he binds his tomatoes: No other end of the world will there be, No other end of the world will there be.

Irony is the glory of slaves.

The partition separating life from death is so tenuous. The unbelievable fragility of our organism suggests a vision on a screen: a kind of mist condenses itself into a human shape, lasts a moment and scatters.

The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.

I am a very good shot. I have hunted for every kind of animal. But I would never kill an animal during mating season.

I find a duck’s opinion of me is very much influenced by whether or not I have bread.

I saw a seagull hanging out by a lake, but I said, “Don’t worry, Dude. I won’t say anything.”

The great lesson is, that unity is behind all. Call it God, Love, Spirit. Allah, Jehovah – it is the same unity that animates all life from the lowest animal to the noblest man.

You cannot teach a crab to walk straight.

Cats are a very mysterious kind of folk. There is always more passing in their minds than we are aware of.

Once the love bug wears off, as it inevitably does, you are shocked to discover that you really didn’t know the object of your affections at all. We know this to be so, even as we repeat the same mistake over and over and over.

There is no difference between the worry of a human mother and an animal mother for their offspring. A mother’s love does not derive from the intellect but from the emotions, in animals just as in humans.