“If you have a hero, look again: you have diminished yourself in some way.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 223)
“The world is not necessarily just. Being good often does not pay off and there is no compensation for misfortune. You have a responsibility to do your best nonetheless.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 223)
“For a long while now I have trusted my dreaming self as wiser than that waking self whose head is cluttered with reason and practicalities, so by trying to control things that he sometimes forgets that the heart has reasons that reason does not know. When I dream, I never forget to trust myself.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 216)
“Along the way, like everyone else, I must bear my burdens. But I do not intend to bear them graciously, nor in silence. I will take my sadness and as I can I will make it sing. In this way when others hear my song, they may resonate and respond out of the depths of their own feelings.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 214)
“My pilgrimage of repeated return to the sea will not end so long as I live. And now I know that I shall live, for as long as is given to me. And should my body be battered even more, then I will live as I can, enjoying what I might, having what joy is available to me, and being what I may to the people whom I love. I must continue my pilgrimage, for it is my only way of remaining open to this vision. It is to this end that I must struggle for the remainder of that pilgrimage that is my life.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 214)
“One of the reasons I stopped getting high was that that colorful fog came to seem like the only reality. Living in between highs was too often an empty drag. Many of my fellow hipsters began to bridge the gap with heroin. Some of them are now dead junkies, overdosed with illusion. I never tried heroin myself, because instinctively I knew that I would have liked it so much that in an instant I would have become the hippest of junkies, lost to myself forever. Since that time, chemically induced pilgrimages have seemed to me to be misleading detours. The way must not be sought by putting ecstasy into my body, but by finding it within my Self. Drugs can give pleasure and being high can be fund but the essence of pilgrimage cannot be found in a vial.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 203)
“Sometimes life seems like a poorly designed cage within which man has been sentenced to be free. Condemned to this freedom, it is difficult for a man to face the fact that he feels like a misfit in this life, difficult until he discovers the secret that ‘all men, finally, are misfits.’ There seems to be no way out of it.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 196)
“[A man] stands somewhere between absolute freedom on the one hand, and total helplessness on the other. All of his important decisions must be made on the basis of insufficient data. It is enough if a man accepts his freedom, takes his best shot, does what he can, faces the consequences of his acts, and makes no excuses. It may not be fair that a man gets to have total responsibility for his own life without total control over it, but it seems to me that for good or for bad, that’s just the way it is.”
Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him! (Page 194)
