"I saw my father for the last time in 1916... The texts of the various legends and songs he had written or dictated...perhaps, by some miracle...may still be preserved among the things I left... The individuality and intellectuality of my father can, in my opinion, be very well pictured in the mind's eye of the reader if I quote here a few of his many favourite 'subjective sayings', which he often used in conversation... when he himself used these sayings in conversation, it always seemed... that they could not have been more apt or better put, but that if anyone else made use of them, they seemed to be entirely beside the point or improbable nonsense. Some of these subjective sayings of his were as follows:"

“Remember you come here having already understood the necessity of struggling with yourself — only with yourself. Therefore thank everyone who gives you the opportunity.”

“It is the greatest mistake to think that man is always one and the same. A man is never the same for long. He is continually changing. He seldom remains the same even for half an hour.”

“Man has no permanent and unchangeable I. Every thought, every mood, every desire, every sensation, says "I.”

“A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.”

“Only help him who is not an idler.”

“The power of changing oneself lies not in the mind, but in the body and the feelings. Unfortunately, however, our body and our feelings are so constituted that they don’t care a jot about anything so long as they are happy. They live for the moment and their memory is short. The mind alone lives for tomorrow. Each has its own merits. The merit of the mind is that it looks ahead. But it is only the other two that can "do.”