Goldmund Quotes

“A poet is a pillar of light in the darkness. Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann”

“And was it not perhaps more childlike and human to lead a Goldmund-life, more courageous, more noble perhaps in the end to abandon oneself to the cruel stream of reality, to chaos, to commit sins and accept their bitter consequences rather than live a clean life with washed hands outside the world, laying out a lonely harmonious thought-garden, strolling sinlessly among one's sheltered flower beds. Perhaps it was harder, braver and nobler to wander through forests and along the highways with torn shoes, to suffer sun and rain, hunger and need, to play with the joys of the senses and pay for them with suffering. At any rate, Goldmund had shown him that a man destined for high things can dip into the lowest depths of the bloody, drunken chaos of life, and soil himself with much dust and blood, without becoming small and common, without killing the divine spark within himself, that he can err through the thickest darkness without extinguishing the divine light and the creative force inside the shrine of his soul.”

“Despite every objection; they sank into insignificance - and in the end, love, was the answer to everything.”

“I understand you well. Now we have no need to dispute: you are awake, and so you have seen the difference between us, the difference between men akin to their father and those who take their destiny from a woman; the difference between spirit and intellect.”

“That said the conspirators: Tell us your secret and we will have betrayed you for a lifetime.”

“Vanity and superficiality, placed deliberately on display, can be a burden; take this nonsense overboard.”

“I have learned through dreams more wisdom, than by reading hundreds of books.”

“Relationships with your enemies; you need to cultivate those, because: "Only true enemies stab you in the front.”

“If your inner silence begins to wear a silk fruit; only then, the day will reveal to you its hidden secret.”