... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.

Of whom the world was not worthy [...]

By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.

Many people renounce the world because they can’t find a satisfactory place in it, and almost any spiritual teaching can be used to justify a pathological lack of ambition. For someone who has not yet succeeded at anything and who probably fears failure, a doctrine that criticizes the search for worldly success can be very appealing. And devotion to a guru — a combination of love, gratitude, awe, and obedience — can facilitate an unhealthy return to childhood.

Among the many strange servilities mistaken for pieties, one of the least lovely is that which hopes to flatter God by despising the world, and vilifying human nature.