Sun and rain Quotes

“Man hurries, God does not. That is why man's works are uncertain and maimed, while God's are flawless and sure. My eyes welling with tears, I vowed never to transgress this eternal law again. Like a tree I would be blasted by wind, struck by sun and rain, and would wait with confidence; the long-desired hour of flowering and fruit would come.”

“But doctor, even you, a Hittite, saw what our Mycenaean shields were like! Oh, don’t smile, I may be an old woman, but I known what I am talking about, and if you will be patient, you will understand, too… You do not see the wholeness of things, the Virtue, the arête. You observe one fact, the single symptom, like the Hittite doctor you are, but your eyes are blind to the Ananke, the whole Order of things which even the gods cannot infringe. The shield is formed on a frame, and that frame is the will of man. But after the sun and rain have been on it a week, its shape has changed beyond man’s guiding; and that is Ananke… though I began upon a firm frame, the hide of my experience has tautened and twisted until now I am as Ananke will me to be. I am not what I wished, or others wished for me: I am what it was ordained for me to become ever the seed passed from my father to my mother. I am the cow’s hide, tormented to the only shape it can be. Now do you see? Do you see that there may be no anger, no regret, no remorse?”

“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.”

“To imagine that I was pleased would have been an understatement, if I was a dog, my tail would be wagging my arse off.”

“Trees endure the hot sun and rainstorms by sending their roots down deeper. The adversity they face is eventually the source of great stability. The harshness of the elements surrounding them causes them to seek another source of life. They will one day come to the place that even the greatest of windstorms cannot affect their ability to produce fruit.”