One must develop a certain obliquity of conscience, an elastic attitude toward the truth, to be effective in diplomacy.

Trevanian, Shibumi: A Novel [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]

Hermetic quote Trevanian Shibumi one must develop certain obliquity conscience elastic attitude toward truth effective diplomacy

Consider also:

  1. “Please, tell me who you are,” I said. I am me, that’s all.
  2. “A pageant of the Eastern gods is unfolding as I dance naked towards his naked body. The wheel of creation and destruction, things of surface and illusion dying into purer being. We are the perfected. Changing yet unchanging in annulled time. I dance toward him and each moment is lost, unremembered.”
  3. “Life always has room for heroism.” It was not just romantic nonsense but a precise and sober statement of the fact that our Soviet life is not the ultimate instance of reality but only, as it were, its anteroom.
  4. “No, Billy, Lucifer Morningstar is my true and given name.”
  5. “These were the rules of chaos, and from that chaos a sort of deranged solidarity emerged: Within a few seconds, the illusion of individuality had been swept away”