Siddhartha

by Hermann Hesse

He envied them the one thing that he lacked and that they had: the sense of importance with which they had lived their lives, the depth of their pleasures and sorrows, the anxious but sweet happiness of their continual power to love.

The world had caught him; pleasure, covetousness, idleness, and finally also the vice that he had always despised and scorned as the most foolish — acquisitiveness.

He felt a deep love for the runaway boy, like a wound, and yet felt at the same time that this wound was not intended to fester in him, but that it should heal.

Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.’

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.