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Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give. For what are your possessions but things you keep and guard for fear you may need them tomorrow?
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.
Then a lawyer said, But what of our Laws, master? And he answered: You delight in laying down laws, Yet you delight more in breaking them.
Like children playing by the ocean who build sand-towers with constancy and then destroy them with laughter. But while you build your sand-towers the ocean brings more sand to the shore, And when you destroy them the ocean laughs with you.
Ay, in the grove of the temple and in the shadow of the citadel I have seen the freest among you wear their freedom as a yoke and a handcuff.
Verily all things move within your being in constant half embrace, the desired and the dreaded, the repugnant and the cherished, the pursued and that which you would escape.
Much of your pain is self-chosen.
“No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
When you part from your friend, you grieve not; For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain. And let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.
And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.
Oftentimes in denying yourself pleasure you do but store the desire in the recesses of your being. Who knows but that which seems omitted today, waits for tomorrow?
All your hours are wings that beat through space from self to self.
Could you but see the tides of that breath you would cease to see all else,
The noontide is upon us and our half waking has turned to fuller day, and we must part.
