Life & Wisdom Quote by Gustave Meyrink

Meyrink’s “awake” isn’t caffeine, productivity, or the smug mindfulness of a well-branded morning routine. It’s an occult dare disguised as a self-help sentence. He’s talking about vigilance as a metaphysical posture: the ability to notice the machinery of reality while it’s still running, to catch the mind in the act of dreaming up its own traps. The repetition - “to be awake... is everything” - reads like an incantation, a hypnotic simplification meant to cut through modern life’s noisy complexities. It’s not a comforting slogan; it’s a command.

The subtext is that most people are sleepwalking, not just socially but spiritually: moving through inherited roles, automatic desires, and borrowed opinions. Meyrink wrote in a Europe obsessed with hidden orders, esoteric knowledge, and the uneasy feeling that rational progress hadn’t made anyone wiser. In that climate, “secret” implies initiation: there are levels to reality, and the first threshold isn’t learning more facts but changing the quality of attention. Wakefulness becomes the master key because it’s the precondition for any transformation; without it, even truth gets absorbed as another decoration for the ego.

It also lands as a quiet rebuke to the era’s faith in systems - political, scientific, bureaucratic - that promise salvation through structure. Meyrink’s line insists the real battleground is interior, and the cost of not waking up isn’t ignorance. It’s being lived by forces you never agreed to.