Yes, now I understood for the first time that my soul was not so poor and empty as it had seemed to me, and that it had been only the sun that was lacking to open all its germs, and buds to the light.
— Max Muller
While the river of life glides along smoothly, it remains the same river; only the landscape on either bank seems to change.
The spring of love becomes hidden and soon filled up.
Soon the child learns that there are strangers, and ceases to be a child.
It smote me to the heart that I had found no one in all the world who loved me more than all others.
I was shortly again at the castle, and the Princess gave me her hand to kiss and then brought her children, the young princes and princesses, and we played together, as if we had known each other for years.
How mankind defers from day to day the best it can do, and the most beautiful things it can enjoy, without thinking that every day may be the last one, and that lost time is lost eternity!
And then when all around grows dark, when we feel utterly alone, when all men right and left pass us by and know us not, a forgotten feeling rises in the breast.
Would not the child's heart break in despair when the first cold storm of the world sweeps over it, if the warm sunlight of love from the eyes of mother and father did not shine upon him like the soft reflection of divine light and love?
What is emitted from the divine, though it be only like the reflection from the fire, still has the divine reality in itself, and one might almost ask what were the fire without glow, the sun without light, or the Creator without the creature?
The first pages of memory are like the old family Bible. The first leaves are wholly faded and somewhat soiled with handling. But, when we turn further, and come to the chapters where Adam and Eve were banished from Paradise, then, all begins to grow clear and legible.
Of these years nought remains in memory but the sad feeling that we have advanced and only grown older.
Is it sin, which makes the worm a chrysalis, and the chrysalis a butterfly, and the butterfly dust?
I spend my happiest hours in reading Vedantic books. They are to me like the light of the morning, like the pure air of the mountains - so simple, so true, if once understood.
Every life has its years in which one progresses as on a tedious and dusty street of poplars, without caring to know where he is.
A flower cannot blossom without sunshine, and man cannot live without love.
Whoever knows it also knows that in love there is no More and no Less; but that he who loves can only love with the whole heart, and with the whole soul; with all his strength and with all his will.
Thus one memory follows another until the waves dash together over our heads, and a deep sigh swells the breast, which warns us that we have forgotten to breathe in the midst of these pure thoughts.
That is the returning to God which in reality is never concluded on earth but yet leaves behind in the soul a divine home sickness, which never again ceases.
Not far from our house, and opposite the old church with the golden cross, stood a large building, even larger than the church, and having many towers.
I was so astonished that another had penetrated so deeply into the secrets of my soul, and that he knew what I did not know myself, that when I recovered from it he had already been long upon the street.
I believe I can even yet remember when I saw the stars for the first time.
Childhood has its secrets and its mysteries; but who can tell or who can explain them!
