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Quote by Haruki Murakami

“No, he thought, I’m not cool and collected, and I’m not always doing things at my own pace. It’s just a question of balance. I’m just good at habitually shifting the weight I carry around from one side of the fulcrum to the other, distributing it. Maybe this strikes others as cool. But it isn’t an easy operation. It takes more time than it seems. And even if I do find the right balance, that doesn’t lessen the total weight one bit.”

Quote by Haruki Murakami

Book:Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
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Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

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Haruki Murakami

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Book:Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious
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“Still another barrier for many people which closes the door to success is the mania or passion for reading too many books, because of their inability to make a definite choice. Getting one on a theme which interests them, they invariably soon seek something “new,” and as soon as that has been read, they again start their interminable searching. Their lives pass without being properly and reasonably used. Such men forget that books are much more numerous than the weeks and months they have yet to live through. So what is the good of having read even half of them and dying before making any use of the things which men know only mentally? After all, books are usually for us only crystallized stores of borrowed thoughts created by other men, and not always of use to us, since in all fields of literature they so frequently offer only fiction or near-fiction, which can hardly help an earnest seeker. Although the mind is only a secondary power in man, compared with the higher wisdom consciousness known in Samadhi, which is devoid of thoughts, faults in the structure of that mind are almost an absolute barrier impossible to over come in any study, and especially in the present one. Inadequate comprehension is the same as insufficient knowledge of a foreign alphabet for someone who wants to read in that particular language. It may happen that it is not merely an unquenchable thirst for reading which drives a man from one author to another, but the fact that he is not satisfied with any so far encountered. In such a case there is nothing more to say then: “Seek and ye shall find.”

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Book:Concentration: A Guide to Mental Mastery
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“The same acting-out, the same loss of distance and the same fall into the real threatens thought too, as soon as it crosses the demarcation line which is that of its impossible exchange with truth, as soon as it comes to act out truth. Thought must at all costs keep itself from reality, from the real projection of ideas and their translation into acts. The Overman and the Eternal Return are, in this way, visions and they have the sovereignty of a hypothesis. If we try to turn them into acts or faits accomplis, they become monstrous and ridiculous. The same goes for less visionary perspectives, such as biogenetic experimentation on the human species: as a hypothesis, this opens up all kinds of metaphysical and anthropological questions. But if we move from potential mutation to real projection (as Peter Sloterdijk does in his Menschenpark project), we lose all philosophical distance; and thought, in mingling with the real course of things, offers merely a false alternative to the operation of the system. Thought must refrain from instructing, or being instructed by, a future reality, for, in that game, it will always fall into the trap of a system that holds the monopoly of reality. And this is not a philosophical choice. It is, for thought, a life-and-death question.”

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Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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