Weöres Sándor

Be strict with yourself, but don't torture your nature. Put down your whims, your desires, not that you may be miserable without them, but that you may flow like water and be as sure as the sky.
The rule is not to imprison yourself in it; let it be your dwelling, free to go in and out as you please.
A rule is no good if you wear it with determination, if it rattles on you gloomily and stubbornly; a rule is good if it is absorbed in your feelings and supports you gently and pliantly.

Self-torture is mostly a dead end; sometimes a big detour; very rarely the shortest way.
For most people, a complete abandonment of pleasure is as harmful as indulgence in pleasure. And what lies between the two, moderation ("I enjoy, but in small doses, cautiously, sparingly"): it is constricting.
Educate your desires so that they are not directed towards pleasures and benefits: this avoids both renunciation, self-indulgence and moderation. Shape your desires in such a way that whether you receive the pleasures and benefits of life or the lack of them casually, you need not worry too much about whether you are receiving them or not. If your world of feeling is directed not to the variable but to the constant, if you look at the variable from the outside, as a stranger, if you seek harmony with everything, if you look to the eternal measure: thus you will draw the fangs of your life desires, and the benefits and harms of life will no longer be a danger to you, but will only affect you superficially.

To the individual man, pleasure, profit, seems to be the most important thing; he does not distinguish pleasure from good, profit from purpose. He even conceives of the improvement of the destiny of mankind as the putting of as many people as possible in a more pleasant condition. And he conceives of salvation as eternal enjoyment and eternal profit; whereas salvation is the dissolution of the nightmare of the desire for enjoyment and profit.
The desire for pleasure and profit is nothing but an elementary demand arising from your carnal nature; do not let your soul yield to this demand. The soul's elementary need is different: to be in harmony with everything. And the striving for harmony is disturbed by pleasure and profit as soon as it exceeds the need.

There are many fervent and militant Catholics, Protestants, Israelites, who believe in God only half-heartedly and cannot believe in the dogmas of their religion at all, yet they will fight for their denomination. Of the locomotive they take only the boiler, which is explosive, but not the wheels, which can be used to walk.

Some man looks upon religion as a barter: it is man's duty to behave himself, to obey God's commands and the ordinances; it is God's business to provide man with earthly goods in the same proportion as he has behaved himself, obeyed the commands, performed the ordinances. Accordingly, the most religious and best men ought to be the richest, and the non-religious and law-breakers ought to be miserable.
He who is religious in order to obtain the goods he covets in return: he has already proved his greed and unworthiness. The goodness of God is not fattening and not a charitable institution. The unvarying radiance of divine love is like nothing less than charity, the gratification of desires. If you can grow out of your desires, you will reach God.

What can you do about the plunge into darkness, the general destruction, the universal suffering? nothing and everything. This is nothing and everything: if you do not participate in the darkness with your own feelings and create in yourself a state of whole-manhood: you are guided not by your desires but by the eternal measure. Wherever the tide takes you: to misery, to prosperity, to forced labour, to the battlefield, to the driving-place, to the perishing-place: care not; the dark power can give you nothing and take nothing from you, if the only-virtuous measure is at work in you. You may lose your comfort, your wealth, your health, your freedom, your life; you will lose them all sooner or later, you cannot take them to the grave; but the perfect measure in your depths cannot be violated even by the destruction of the world, so you must wish to be true to it. Trust thyself to the eternal measure: it is the Noah's ark above the all-covering flood.
For your fellow human beings you can do no more than let them know the only way of escape. No one can be saved by force when the flood covers everything.
It is not true that in a flood the crowd wants to climb Noah's Ark. The Noah's ark seems to be the weakest, most clumsy piece of wood, worth more than the bottom of a bush.

Every manifestation of you that unfolds beautifully, freshly, freely: your gift; every manifestation that stinks of your greed: your excrement. From any one of us there is far more dross than bounty, and there is no remedy for this but to clean up our dross; instead, from the beginning and more and more, European man builds from his dung a system, a law, a morality, which he guards with arms, with money, with the seal of authority, with a prestigious body, and demands of all to conform to these palaces of excrement and solemn statues of dung. These are continually cracking and crumbling, spreading a general stench and itching; and they must be repaired and repaired with more and more fresh and softer dung. By degrees mankind has raised over itself a whole metropolis of excrement, which now, in the twentieth century, has fallen upon its masters. Just as once a flood of fire and water fell upon mankind, which had grown into a giant besieging the sky, now mankind, dwarfed into a manure worshipper, has been overtaken by a flood of dung. For centuries there will be nothing but a stifling stench, a stinking stink, a warfare in filth, with rumbling, roaring, dung-smelling weapons instead of the shining weapons of old, until the man of the manure-age is extinct. He who made the whole globe a cesspool is drowning in it.
What can we do about the flood of manure? hold our noses, nothing else. Because anyone who wants to tear down a manure tower is just moving it from one place to another, and in the process is multiplying the ugliness himself. The flood of manure will drain itself away, slowly, until the man of the manure-age has drowned in it to the last. He who has yielded heart and soul to any direction, system, human contrivance, has been swamped by the dung-flood; he who keeps pure feeling, free vision, eternal measure, floats in an ark above the dung-flood. And as after the flood the rainbow appeared in the heavens, to signify that there shall be no more flood: so shall the pure linen appear in the heavens, to signify that there shall be no more flood of dung.

Helpless submission is called civic duty, shouting along with the crowd is called courage, sentimentality is called poetic spirit, the rattling of nuts is called progressive spirit, greedy, narrow-minded edulgence is called wit, group boredom is called entertainment, the play of the glands is called pleasure.
The combination of civic duty, courage, poetic spirit, progressive spirit, wit, amusement and pleasure is called social and economic equilibrium.
The social and economic equilibrium becomes more and more delicate: more and more regulations, restrictions, punishments; soon the people will abhor peace more than war; finally, the equilibrium must be maintained by a permanent state of war. The war begins, in which the will to win is only a rhetoric inherited from the past, the real, secret aim is to drag the war on: neither belligerent dares to take on the economic Gordian knot that peace would mean. Those who can be soldiers are glad because they are better provided for and safer than the general population; and they try to get into the field of battle because there the greatest freedom is promised. Peace will not be order, war will not be confusion, but vice versa; it will be an age of perpetual war. Not one moment of it will resemble a game of chess in reverse, where the winner is the one whose pawns have all been knocked out.
This state of affairs is already partially reached. Now comes a short, serene period, but this is just the bait sunshine of the autumn before the long winter. Within thirty years the era will begin when not man will lead the war, but war will lead man.

Today's man, disconnected from the universal context of existence, shrunk into individuality, will soon lose his individuality, not upwards, but downwards. Since he cannot rise above his individuality, he will fall below it. Soon it will be officially decreed which leader's picture you must hang on the wall, what books and other objects you may have, what you may eat and when, and not only work but also entertainment will be compulsory, in a prescribed way and at a prescribed time; and people who have sunk below their individuality will like it. After a thousand years of European man's individualism, in which he has pitted his personal whims against universal possibilities, now the diabolical order of whims is submerging not only his individuality but his humanity.
And the man of today would be content and happy with this, if the barn were not continually swirling around him.

The invention of our time is compulsory enthusiasm, the revolution institutionalised by authority and the revolt of the oppressors against the oppressed.
Today's regimes of domination are characterised by the fact that they do not necessarily want their lies to be believed, only to be accepted. All military forces must sing about themselves that they are the best, without anyone believing it; all citizens must profess about the head of state that he is wise, heroic, a benefactor, without anyone believing it; and so on.
Now even a plausible lie is an unattainable height. We are in a pit, lower than the bottom of the frog.

Sin is most dangerous, not when it openly and boldly opposes virtue, but when it disguises itself as virtue and infects the cognitive sense.
The chief vice of love is not hatred, but sentimental benevolence; that of patriotism is not denial of one's nation, but dignified lechery and gibberish patriotism; that of love's morality is not amorous immorality, but social decency, which, while it persecutes unconcealed lust, offers a hundred substitutes for lust.

Why is there a snake at the entrance of the pharmacy? In its place, the modern man could paint some cheerful little pigs, almost bursting with health.
Why is there a blindfolded goddess over the judge's chair? The man of today could take the blindfold off the goddess's eyes: let her be like a saleswoman seeking to please the public.
Why is there a crucified corpse on the altar? The modern man could have replaced it with a street vendor offering his wares.

To say that someone is a "patron of science and art" is almost as ridiculous as saying that a religious person is a "patron of God". Just as God is not dependent on being believed in, science and art are not affected by being cared about. The home of science and art is not existence, the 'esse' , but possibility, the 'posse' , and if it manifests itself in existence, existence is enriched; it is infinite humility on the part of science and art to allow itself to manifest itself in existence, since all its form-filling is handicapped. And if science and art disappear from human destiny: it is not their destruction, but that of their handicapped manifestations, and of the master of these manifestations, man.

The value of money, wealth, rank, prestige above all else, the economism that today's man sees as the ultimate realism: it is in fact idealism, albeit in a negative and parodic way. Money is not food, not drink, not clothing, not a work of art, something essentially useless, in fact it does not exist, it is a mere idea and ideal; and the accumulation of this fictitious thing is regarded by modern man as the whole of sanity. The accumulated wealth, which over-abounds beyond necessity, is only a nuisance and a problem, and sooner or later it slips out from under its owner, so that even the necessary will not remain. Rank removes all that is tolerable in man, and sets up senseless barriers, which breed hatred and envy. Validation leads nowhere, because there is always further and further down this road, the desire for validation is an unbearable itch, like a skin disease. In addition, modern man is heaping on himself a pile of the most obdurate community principles in impossible handcuffs. In the confusion of obsessions and emotions, community, nation, race, people, home, public safety, duty, the defence of our borders, the raising of our standard of living, the spread of our culture, have become a man-eating idol. If you look around you: prohibition, coercion, slogan, rubbish, drivel, hogwash, propaganda, profiteering, pushing, fear, insecurity. The intolerance of our systems is something that people today groan about the most and would like to compensate for with some pompous respect for culture: each system calls itself the saviour of culture and the others the destroyers of culture. But today's man, this negative idealist, detached from all reality, wants to adore culture in vain, his adoration is an empty set of words, a grab-bag of measures, a constant cloaking of his own yawns; and he sees culture as a fairground gibberish, an incessant saving of people, nations, communities, a tasteless self-adulation of "geniuses", a social event. Culture is static, calm, non-institutionalizable; the more today's fidgety-moving man jumps around it, the more he crushes it. The more he 'takes culture to heart', the more he seems to have no feeling for it; the more he 'saves and protects' it, the more he seems to need a protection of it. He moves money, armies, a deliberately dumbed-down herd of people, and he is destroyed, when a single breath of culture could save him. But that one breath is missing, and the money, the army, the herd of men continue to grind onwards.
There is only one way out of this cave of human suffering of human life, of human emotions, but it will not happen: if humanity were to change to a sober, stable basis: to satisfy its needs and not its fears and emotions. Since there is no hope of this, each man can only create a tolerable world within himself, for himself, if he is strong enough to renounce all prejudices and see with his own eyes, like a child: Everyone can only achieve realism instead of negative idealism, internal, unshakable security instead of the nightmare of external order, money, wealth, rank, prestige. And only the few can achieve it, even for themselves, who have been given the sense to do so.

Whichever nation wants to be superior to other nations: becomes an executioner or a clown.
The life of their nation is polluted by those who extol the real or supposed virtues of their nation and refuse to tolerate harsh criticism.
The greatest scourge that can befall a people is to destroy its judgment by one-sided rule. Such a people is debauched, and the more tramp adventurer reaches for it, the more easily it throws itself at him. There is no outside menace, no endless ravages, no millennia of oppression to equal it.

"What you give to me, you give to all", proclaims the power on earth.
"What you give to all, you give to me," proclaims the heavenly power.

There are four types of leader: Procrustes, Napoleon, Uncle Sam and Solon.
Procrustes is an advocate of an idea that he wants to force his nation into, if it breaks, if it tears.
Napoleon is a passionate gambler, and whether he wins or loses, he will always be wasted.
Uncle Sam sits in the royal hall like in a spice shop, cunning with dekagrams and dimes.
Solon is attentive to divine inspiration, all his actions spring from eternal measure and his kingdom flourishes.

Don't have the seeds of any social betterment in you. For every abstract community is a mist; and he who runs in the mist will sooner or later stumble on the living.
Respect and cherish your narrow and wider home: family, nation, humanity. But do not confuse any of these with those who claim harm by reference to these concepts.
What is harmful? if thou wouldst help Peter by restraining Paul.
"I identify with Peter, I dislike Paul; I kiss Peter, I beat Paul" - this is sentimentality; this is the common skeleton of public thought; the present age begs for. The only way to help anybody is not at the expense of others.
You can improve your people and humanity only by improving yourself.
Truth can never redeem mankind, always only the one-man.

The most common and typical symptom of a disordered, foggy mind is hatred of a community. The cause of all trouble is the Jews, or: the Catholics, or: the money-men, etc.: the hated community must be destroyed and all will be well. Angry outbursts against the group in question, but preferably when there is no possibility of unpleasantness. And the hatred for one member of the hated community is considerably less than for the community as a whole; the closest good friends are the exception, only the rest are fiery.
Such hatred is very easily infected, for it is easier and more convenient to vent the bitterness and disappointment of our failures by a general fit of temper than to control ourselves. In fact, there is no group of people more justifiable to hate than, for example, the fat or the tall.
Ask yourself often: "Is there a community or individual I would lustfully harm?" And if there is, seek out the cause of your grievance; you will find that the real cause is never in the person, even if he may have been a nuisance to you, but in yourself, in your unfulfilled desires. By revenge, or idle hatred, you will not improve anything, but you will poison your own soul.

The most egregious examples of sentimentality are novels and films where characters can be separated into groups of good and evil. The most angelic are the protagonists, with whom the reader cries and laughs, almost merging with them; but if we look closely at these protagonists, they are not so much angels: they are driven by their petty, greedy, sweet desires. The other characters are classified as good and sympathetic or evil and hateful according to whether they support or hinder the protagonists. Most people today look at the world in the way of sentimental novels: those who are guided by their desires and those who support those desires are the good; those who hinder their desires are the bad.
Today's average man's knowledge is astonishingly simple-minded. Most men of today see only the surface of you that you present to their likes and wants; they do not look at your inner self; women judge you by whether you amuse and excite them, men by how you fit into their principles, plans, and convictions. Exchanges the good for the attractive, the seductive; no wonder that in private life as well as in public life is mostly led by adventurers. He is perpetually disappointed and disillusioned; he blames all the powers of heaven and earth, the wickedness of others, sometimes even his own folly; only he does not think of looking at his fellow-men not through his needs, but through their selves.

Let not your love be like hunger, greedily choosing between the edible and the inedible; but like light, shedding its light with serenity on all before it.
When your love begins to choose, it is no longer love, but a duality of craving and disgust. And this: the sentimentality that is more dangerous than anything else today; its sugary secretion has smeared mankind.
Of all human emotions, sentimentality is the most miserable. To love in one direction is to hate in the other; his affection salivates, his hatred spits. It has no constant measure, it measures all things to its own swirling formlessness; wherever it turns, no good comes of it.
The most dangerous devil-marriage of the present age is the union of Mistress Sentimentality and Mr. Propaganda. Whatever nonsense propaganda wants to get accepted, it shapes it in such a way as to provoke from the sentimentality of the masses a stir in one direction and indignation in another, and it has a winning cause.
Sentimentality is a two-headed female: one head smiles sweetly and kisses greedily, the other sheds tears, bites and pokes. Its kissing head is now almost universally confused with goodness, love, morality, domesticity, taste, idealism, and its biting head with law, justice, retribution, and justice.
The sickness of our age, the spiritual groundlessness and general confusion, stems from this: the smile and the tears of the double-headed beast. It has done more harm than any other passion: it has confounded common sense.

Do not covet anyone's love. Refuse no one's love.
Let your love shine like the light of a fire: equally on all. Let those who come near you have more of your light and warmth than those who do not need you. May your family members, your daily companions, and those who turn to you be to you as the room of the stove to which you are assigned to warm it.

Don't suppress your bad habits, but polish them. Whatever harmful, sick, malignant tendencies you find: remember that anything can only have a bad condition, not a bad nature.
Reject nothing from the outside world; do not hate, abhor, or be disgusted. If you dislike something, it is a sign that you do not know it well enough. All that is filth in the world is filth only in relation to you and not in itself; withdraw from it and it is no longer filth, but a neutral phenomenon.
When you have eaten soup from a plate, you say to the empty plate that remains, 'Dirty;' but there is nothing on it but the residue of the soup which you have just eaten as clean. The dung in the middle of the room is filth, in the field of grain it is a life-giving force. So it is with everything that appears clean or filthy; nothing is good or bad in itself, but only according to its position.
That which is clean in its relation to you, receive; that which is unclean in its relation to you, do not touch; but love equally that which belongs to you and that which is untouchable. Do not hate, do not abhor, do not be disgusted. If you dislike something, it is a sign both of your lack of understanding and of the fact that the object of your dislike is in some way present in you. Do you hate the rich? purge your desire for wealth and you will not hate. Hate womanizers? purge your sensual desire and you will not hate. In such a case, you must not stigmatize or try to correct the object of your dislike, but find its counterpart within yourself and refine it until the dislike is dissipated.
You should only try to correct the faults of others if you can see them clearly, without being repugnant to yourself; and if you are sure that your intervention is not an intrusion or a hopeless attempt.

The unchanging existence neither desires nor hates the changing life, but embraces it like a nest embraces the baby birds perched within, without feeling and yet with infinite love.
Likewise, he who has put his root from life into being; he does not rejoice in the evolving, nor lament the lost; he wishes to help no one; he loves all things alike, without feeling and infinitely.
He praises without admiration and reproves without disgust, for all things in life are ultimately neither good nor bad; nothing is better than anything, only the journey has different stages.

As soon as you no longer have a need for pleasure: you learn the way of uninterrupted pleasure and you don't use it.
As soon as you live no matter how long: you will know the way of eternal life on earth and you will not live it.
As soon as you realize that mankind does not need to be made happy, peaceful, wise: you will know the way of it and you will not make use of it.
All that seems most desirable: is the most powerful poison. It would make the world go to hell.
"As soon as you don't need it: everything is yours" - that's the sign of the marketplace of life.

I was travelling on a train, third class. A nun boarded with a lot of luggage: things for a new children's shelter.
He was not wearing anything remarkable to the eye, but his being was radiant: he was no longer affected by life on earth, which did not prevent him from being more active than those who want a hundred things from life.
I addressed her. Have you got all your luggage? She thought about it and started counting: "One, two, three... eight, nine" and then pointed to herself: "ten". For her, her own body was just luggage. This simple-minded, helpless, absent-minded little servant is more powerful than all the weapons on earth put together.

If you have separately recognized your unchanging base layer: your timeless, infinite being, in which lies the eternal measure; and its temporal, finite garment: your multiform individuality, in which lie the occasional needs: you are enabled to be guided by your eternal being, not by your ever-changing individuality.
Then you can recognize the true role of your individuality: it is only a signpost to guide you through the world of phenomena. Desires will no longer be violent, but will be like signs on a map: it is up to your discretion how you adapt to them, they are not demanding. Bodily suffering no longer affects you: your body writhes and wails in agony, your being watches and cares for it like a strange, sick animal. Hunger and thirst no longer affect you, nor sensuality, nor joy and sorrow, nor desire for knowledge: you perceive and repair the defects of your body, your feelings, your intellect, as strangely as you would a wrinkle, a stain, a tear in your garment. All that seems desirable in life: wealth, success, power, health, are no more to you than the playthings of childhood to the adult; it is not your appetite but your situation that determines what you wear. Your eternal being does not desire anything, not even salvation: it desires only as steam desires to rise and as a stone desires to fall: not according to its personal desire, but according to the law of its position.
If you have taken the light of your existence out of your individuality and placed it in your eternal being: you have become inviolable, you have taken your destiny into your own hands. You can no longer be harmed or benefited, you function without reward, as the river rolls sand, gives life to fish, carries boat.

Think of life as the giant snake. If you keep it at a distance, you can admire its dancing curves and the rhythmic pattern of its skin, and you can care for it and feed it. If you keep it to yourself, it will coil upon you and you will no longer delight in it, and not you will feed it, but your flesh and blood.
Do not keep life from you by hiding from it, for it will creep after you unnoticed, or unexpectedly crush your hiding place. There is no escaping it, not even into death.
Keep life so at a distance from you that you may have dominion over it: as the serpent is dominated by the snake charmer with his whistle music.
The music that makes the serpent of life tame and obey, emanates from the naked, boundless soul, stripped of finite needs.
Neither in idleness of hermitage nor in activity you can't conquer life; only in yourself, if you arrange your feeble qualities to conform to the perfect measure.
If you achieve this: your idleness is as active as the sunshine; your activity is as idle as the change of the weather.

Renounce nothing: for he that hath renounced is withered in that. But do not be a slave to your desires.
To cling to repressed passions is as bitter as to crumble among unleashed passions.
If you indulge your desires, they will mate and mate again. If you kill your desires, they come back as ghosts. If you tame your desires: you can ensnare them and plough and sow with dragons, like perfect power itself.
Most men, if they happen to catch sight of some monster of their own abyss, push it back into the gloom with horror; henceforth the monster is more-anxious and slowly cracks the wall. If you see one or other of your monsters, do not abhor it, nor be frightened, nor lie to yourself, but rather be glad that you have recognised it; take care of it, for it is easily tamed and becomes a good pet.
You have basically no good or bad qualities. Your well-groomed qualities are good; your cherished or neglected qualities are bad.

One by one, examine all the contents of your personality and sort them out. Look at your habits: where they come from, what they do, where they are going.
Dissect your individuality and all its contents will appear to you as alien.
Dismantle your individuality and do not fear to be impoverished: for it will be replaced by the richness of boundless coherence.
Dissolve your individuality and fear not to lose anything: for if you expel the unwashed, you will find it washed in its place.
Dissolve your individuality and the infinite currents of your soul, which are not within you and not without you, will be set free, pervading everything.
He who is ruled by his individuality: if he gets ahead, he becomes a boor; if he falls behind, he becomes a rag. And he who is mastering his individuality: in reality he is unaffected by fortune and misfortune.