He who hasn't tasted bitter things hasn't earned sweet things.
Preacher who says that the sweet life is made from bitter parts is more or less telling those who have come to mourn the teenage suicide that this is just one bitter ingredient in the sweet thing foreordained by the benevolent god. To which I want to shake my fist and say: There is not one sweet thing about it. It is only bitter.
Some things which are remote in space and time from a living creature, especially a human creature, may form his environment even more truly than some of the things close to him.
I am not interested in things getting better; what I want is more: more human beings, more dreams, more history, more consciousness, more suffering, more joy, more disease, more agony, more rapture, more evolution, more life.
To be surrounded by beautiful things has much influence upon the human creature; to make beautiful things has more.
You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you've tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses.
Whatever we focus on is bound to expand. Where we see the negative, we call forth more negative. And where we see the positive, we call forth more positive. Having loved and lost, I now love more passionately. Having won and lost, I now win more soberly. Having tasted the bitter, I now savor the sweet.
Bad temper is its own scourge. Few things are more bitter than to feel bitter. A man's venom poisons himself more than his victim.
The more spiritual a man desires to be, the more bitter does his present life become to him; because he sees more clearly and perceives more sensibly the defects of human corruption.
Few things are more bitter than to feel bitter.
Ah love is bitter and sweet,
but which is more sweet
the bitterness or the sweetness,
none has spoken it.
The arts shows that you're civilized, and it makes life sweet. So you can exist and you can buy more things and you can be more - we're dealing with a form of commercialism that obscures a prior relationship to quality, and it's a national problem.
For the first time in my life I tasted death, and death tasted bitter, for death is birth, is fear and dread of some terrible renewal.
The great Big Black Things that have loomed against the horizon of my life, threatening to devour me, simply loomed and nothing more. The things that have really made me miss my train have
always been sweet, soft, pretty, pleasant things of which I was not in the least afraid.
Experience life in all possible ways -- good-bad, bitter-sweet, dark-light, summer-winter. Experience all the dualities. Don't be afraid of experience, because the more experience you have, the more mature you become.
There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?