Sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

To return to the source of things, one has to travel in the opposite direction.

It's one of those things a person has to do; sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.

They had their faces twisted toward their haunches and found it necessary to walk backward, because they could not see ahead of them. ...And since he wanted so to see ahead, he looks behind and walks a backward path.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

The further you go, the more you have to be proud of. At the same time, in order to come a long way, you have to be behind to begin with. IN the end, though maybe it's not how you reach a place that matters. Just that you get there at all.

471. It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin and the beginning. And not try to go further back.

I did not know how to reach him, how to catch up with him... The land of tears is so mysterious.

Sometimes the only way up is down. Sometimes the only way forward is to back up.

I've come too far, and I don't know how to get back.

Sometimes you have to travel a long way to find what is near

God save me from fools with a little philosophy — no one is more difficult to reach.

Scepticism is always a back road leading to some credo or other.

Getting hold of the difficulty deep down is what is hard. Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new way. The change is as decisive as, for example, that from the alchemical to the chemical way of thinking. The new way of thinking is what is so hard to establish. Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expression, the old problems are discarded along with the old garment.