Top quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky. Votes: 38

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. Votes: 26

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty. Votes: 25

Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart. Votes: 19

All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you. Votes: 16

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers. Votes: 15

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems. Votes: 13

And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been. Votes: 13

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things. Votes: 11

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always. Votes: 11

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Votes: 10

It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning. Votes: 8

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. Votes: 8

One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one. Votes: 5

Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakable tender hand, placed beside another thread and held and carried by a hundred others. Votes: 5

Often a starwas waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward youout of the distant path, or as you walkedunder an open window, a violinyielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission. Votes: 5

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger. Votes: 4

Whoever you are, go out into the evening,leaving your room, of which you know every bit;your house is the last before the infinite,whoever you are. Votes: 4

Our heart always transcends us. Votes: 4

There may be good, but there are no pleasant marriages. Votes: 3

There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several. Votes: 3

Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Votes: 3

There are so many things about which some old man ought to tell one while one is little; for when one is grown one would know them as a matter of course. Votes: 2

More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed. Votes: 1

think: the hero prolongs himself, even his fallingwas only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth. Votes: 1

Not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree. Votes: 1

His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world. Votes: 1

And these thingsthat keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient,they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue.They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts,into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be. Votes: 1

Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walkonly on feelings. That faces upwardand in its mirrorreceives heavenly roads, which travelalong themselves.That has learned to walk upon waterwhen it scoops,that walks upon wells,transfiguring every path.That steps into other hands,changes those that are like itinto a landscape:wanders and arrives within them,fills them with arrival." Votes: 1

And many a day's hours were like that. As if someone fashioned my likeness somewherein order to torment it slowly with needles.I felt each sharp prick of his playing,and it was: as if a rain fell on mein which all things change." Votes: 1

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song." Votes: 0

Painting is something that takes place among the colors, and one has to leave them alone completely, so that they can settle the matter among themselves. Their intercourse: this is the whole of painting. Whoever meddles, arranges, injects his human deliberation, his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already disturbing and clouding their activity. Votes: 0

Oh longing for places that were not Cherished enough in that fleeting hour How I long to make good from afar The forgotten gesture, the additional act. Votes: 0

a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude Votes: 0

That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. Votes: 0

When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everthing in me that is bewildered and confused. Votes: 0

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night. Votes: 0

It almost seems as if autumn were the true creator, more creative than the spring, which is too even-toned, more creative when it comes with its will-to-change and shatters the much too ready-made, self-satisfied and really almost bourgeois-complacent image of summer. Votes: 0

Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are. Votes: 0

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart... Votes: 0

There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult. Votes: 0

Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. Votes: 0

Earth, my dearest, oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over...Unspeakably, I have belonged to you, from the flush. Votes: 0

It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case. Votes: 0

At the bottom no one in life can help anyone else in life; this one experiences over and over in every conflict and every perplexity: that one is alone. That isn't as bad as it may first appear; and again it is the best thing in life that each should have everything in himself; his fate, his future, his whole expanse and world. Votes: 0

The thought of being a creator, of engendering, of shaping is nothing without the continuous great confirmation and embodiment in the world, nothing without the thousandfold assent from Things and animals... beautiful and rich only because it is full of inherited memories of the engendering and birthing of millions. Votes: 0

We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen. Votes: 0

Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle. Votes: 0

Painting is something that takes place among the colors. Votes: 0

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. Votes: 0

Never believe fate is more than the condensation of childhood. Votes: 0

[A]t bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed. Votes: 0

Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through. Votes: 0

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. Votes: 0

Yield not thy neck To fortune's yoke, but let thy dauntless mind Still ride in triumph over all mischance. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Votes: 0

Our deepest fears are like dragons, guarding our deepest treasure. Votes: 0

Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from. Votes: 0

Be ahead of all farewells as if they were behind you, like the winter that is just departing. Votes: 0

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible. Votes: 0

Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander on the boulevards, up and down, restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing. Votes: 0

Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything. Votes: 0

Every angel is terrifying. Votes: 0

There would have to be bread, some rich, whole-grain bread and zwieback, and perhaps on a long, narrow dish some pale Westphalian ham laced with strips of white fat like an evening sky with bands of clouds. There would be some tea ready to be drunk, yellowish golden tea in glasses with silver saucers, giving off a faint fragrance. Votes: 0

We wasters of sorrows! How we stare away into sad endurance beyond them, trying to foresee their end! Whereas they are nothing else than our winter foliage, our sombre evergreen, one of the seasons of our interior year. Votes: 0

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song. Votes: 0

Fate loves to invent patterns and designs. Its difficulty lies in complexity. But life itself is difficult because of its simplicity. It has only a few things of a grandeur not fit for us. Votes: 0

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing. Votes: 0

a kind of memory that tells us that what we're now striving for was once nearer and truer and attached to us with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, there it was breath. After the first home the second one seems draughty and strangely sexed. Votes: 0

Everything is gestation and then birthing. Votes: 0

Everything is gestation and bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life. Votes: 0

Be of good courage all is before you, and time passed in the difficult is never lost...What is required of us is that we live the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Votes: 0

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. ...live in the question. Votes: 0

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves...At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer. Votes: 0

This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly. Votes: 0

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. Votes: 0

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. Votes: 0

May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children. Votes: 0

Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner -- what is it? if not the intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming. Votes: 0

If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow Votes: 0

All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy. Votes: 0

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. Votes: 0

You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world. Votes: 0

I think of you often, dear, and with such concentrated wishes that it really must help you in some way. Votes: 0

As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still, it is we who move in infinite space. Votes: 0

The only journey is the one within. Votes: 0

My art is representational by choice....if the art of painting is to survive, it must describe and express people, their lives and times. It must communicate. Votes: 0

Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly they are passed on unopened. Votes: 0

Love is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack. Votes: 0

A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship. Votes: 0

What keeps you from... living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy? Votes: 0

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess. Votes: 0

But you, divine poet, you sang on till the end as the swarm of rejected maenads attacked you, shrieking, you overpowered their noise with harmony, and from pure destruction arose your transfigured song. Votes: 0

O trees of life, O when are you wintering?We are not unified. We have no instinctslike those of migratory birds. Useless, and late,we force ourselves, suddenly, onto the wind,and fall down to an indifferent lake.We realise flowering and fading together.And somewhere lions still roam. Never knowing,as long as they have their splendour, of any weakness. Votes: 0

If my devils are to leave me, I'm afraid my angels will take flight as well. Votes: 0

The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain. Votes: 0

And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been Votes: 0

Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Votes: 0

Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything. Votes: 0

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Votes: 0

Speaking of August Rodin: He raised his world above us in an immense arc, and made it a part of nature. Votes: 0

A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be, when all the stars are dead Votes: 0

No se tiene derecho a abrir un libro si no se compromete uno a leerlos todos. Votes: 0

This, above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write? Delve deep into yourself. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this question witha strong and simple 'I must' then build your lfie according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. Votes: 0

Here is the time for the sayable, here is its home.Speak and attest. More than everthe things we can live with are falling away,and ousting them, filling their place, a will with no image.Will beneath crusts which readily crackwhenever the act inside swells and seeks new borders. Votes: 0

In marriage, the point is not to achieve a rapid union by tearing down and toppling all boundaries. Rather, in a good marriage, each person appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude and thus shows him the greatest faith he can bestow. Votes: 0

They all have tired mouthsand bright seamless souls.And a longing (as for sin)sometimes haunts their dreams.They are almost all alike; in God's gardens they keep still,like many, many intervalsin his might and melody.Only when they spread their wingsare they wakers of a wind:as if God with his broad sculptor-hands leafed through the pagesin the dark book of the beginning. Votes: 0

Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstanding that can gather around a new name. Votes: 0

How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Votes: 0

That is fundamentally the only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things that can befall us Votes: 0

Think... of the world which you carry within yourself... and set it above everything that you notice about you. Your inmost happening is worth your whole love, that is what you must somehow work at, and not loose too much time and too much courage in explaining your attitude to people. Votes: 0

Only he whose bright lyrehas sounded in shadowsmay, looking onward, restorehis infinite praise. Only he who has eatenpoppies with the deadwill not lose ever againthe gentlest chord.Though the image upon the pooloften grows dim:Know and be still.Inside the Double Worldall voices becomeeternally mild. Votes: 0

What an unilateral life, when from the material of a renunciation, we must fashion something we love. Votes: 0

Isn't it time that, in love, we freed ourselves from the loved one and, trembling, endured:as the arrow endures the string, collecting itselfto be more than itself as it shoots? Votes: 0

Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence. Votes: 0

Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love. Votes: 0

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor futurelessens . . . . Superabundant existencewells in my heart. Votes: 0

Now I come to you full of future. And from habit we begin to live our past. Votes: 0

Wishes are memories coming from our future! Votes: 0

His gaze, bluntedby the unnumbered processionof iron bars, uncountedas his softly padded steps.Smooth motion of blood and sinewturning in its own, small circleprescribed by bars and walls...and skin, confined.Suddenly, without warning,a flash of light and imagepierces the caged brain,and passing through its beating heartto stillness finds its way. Votes: 0

Let everything happen to youBeauty and terrorJust keep goingNo feeling is final Votes: 0

When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small. Votes: 0

If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable. Votes: 0

only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being. Votes: 0

Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it. Votes: 0

Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confidence in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer Votes: 0

Look: the trees exist; the houseswe dwell in stand there stalwartly. Only wepass by it all, like a rush of air.And everything conspires to keep quiet about us,half out of shame perhaps, half out of some secret hope. Votes: 0

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,just once. And never again. But to have beenthis once, completely, even if only once:to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing. Votes: 0

For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it becomes clear that most people get to know only one corner of their room, a window seat, a strip of floor which they pace up and down. Votes: 0

No, my life is not this precipitous hourthrough which you see me passing at a run. Votes: 0

Praise, my dear one.Let us disappear into praising.Nothing belongs to us. Votes: 0

Society in its wisdom has found ways of constructing refuges of all kinds, for since it has been disposed to make the love-life a pastime, it has also felt obliged to trivialize it, to make it cheap, risk-free and secure, as public pleasures usually are. Votes: 0

for sometime now I have believed that it is our own force, all our own force that is still too great for us. It is true that we do not know it; but is it not just that which is most our own of which we know the least? Votes: 0

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading. Votes: 0

Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. Votes: 0

For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. Votes: 0

Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious. Votes: 0

But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem:they might point to the catkins hangingfrom the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the raindescending on black earth in early spring. ---And we, who always think of happinessrising, would feel the emotionthat almost baffles uswhen a happy thing falls. Votes: 0

It was not in me It came and wentI wanted to hold it It was held by wine(I no longer know what it was) Votes: 0

If we surrenderedto earth's intelligencewe could rise up rooted, like trees. Votes: 0

There are no classes in life for beginners: right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult. Votes: 0

Perhaps all the dragons of your life are princesses, who are only waiting for us to show a little beauty and courage. Perhaps at the very bottom every horror is something helpless, that wants help from us Votes: 0

Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words. Votes: 0

To write rhythmic prose one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous and multiple rhythm of the blood. Prose needs to be built like a cathedral. There, one is truly without a name, without ambition, without help; on scaffoldings, alone with one's consciousness. Votes: 0

It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it. Votes: 0

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other. Votes: 0

Someday you will name me, then gently place those burning holy roses in my hair. Votes: 0

Lord, it is time. The summer was very big. Lay thy shadow on the sundials, and on the meadows let the winds go loose. Command the last fruits that they shall be full; give them another two more southerly days, press them on to fulfillment and drive the last sweetiness into the heavenly wine. Votes: 0

Isn't it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere. Votes: 0

Verses are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough) -- they are experiences. For the sake of a verse one must see many cities, men, and things, one must know the animals feel how birds fly, and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning. Votes: 0

Look, lovers: almost separately they come towards us through the flowery grass and slowly; parting's so far from thought of, they indulge the extravagance of walking unembraced. Votes: 0

Understand, I'll slip quietly away from the noisy crowd when I see the pale stars rising, blooming, over the oaks. I'll pursue solitary pathways through the pale twilit meadows with only this one dream: You come too. Votes: 0

Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life Votes: 0

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens. Votes: 0

He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog. Votes: 0

Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it. Votes: 0

. . . denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben andern. (... for there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.) Votes: 0

... be indulgent toward those who ... are afraid of the aloneness that you trust. Votes: 0

...a carefree letting go of oneself, not a caution, but a wise blindness. Votes: 0

A billion stars go spinning through the night, / glittering above your head, / But in you is the presence that will be / when all the stars are dead. Votes: 0

A birdsong can even, for a moment, make the whole world into a sky within us, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between its heart and the world's. Votes: 0

A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. Votes: 0

A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. Votes: 0

Across the moment, aeons speak with aeons. More than we experienced has gone by. Votes: 0

Again and again in history some people wake up. They have no ground in the crowd and move to broader deeper laws. They carry strange customs with them and demand room for bold and audacious action. The future speaks ruthlessly through them. They change the world. Votes: 0

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading! Votes: 0

All companionship can consist in only the strengthening of neighboring solitudes, giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to become closer to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling "“ I have learned over and over again, there is scarcely anything more difficult than to love one another. Votes: 0

All feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts you. Everything you can think of as you face your childhood, is good. Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn't intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom. Votes: 0

All professions are... filled with demands. Votes: 0

All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood. Votes: 0

All things want to float. Votes: 0

Always trust yourself and your own feelings, as opposed to arguments and discussions. If it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Votes: 0

And do not change. Do not divert your love from visible things. But go on loving what is good, simple and ordinary; animals and things and flowers, and keep the balance true. Votes: 0

And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses - would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? Votes: 0

and I circle ten thousand years long; And I still don't know if I'm a falcon, a storm, or an unfinished song Votes: 0

And isn't the whole world yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept. You felt in such complete harmony with God, when every morning you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could have their turn. You thought it would be shabby to save them and repair them; you used them up and held out your hands, again and again, for more world. For your love was equal to everything. Votes: 0

And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things. Votes: 0

And one of the things I find most moving is the way people with infirmities manage to embrace Life, and from the cool flowers by the wayside reach conclusions about the vast splendour of its great gardens. They can, if their souls' strings are finely tuned, arrive with much less effort at the feeling of eternity; for everything we do, they may dream. And precisely where our deeds end, theirs begin to bear fruit. Votes: 0

And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves - not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them. Votes: 0

And we, spectators always, everywhere, looking at, never out of, everything! It fills us. We arrange it. It collapses. We re-arrange it, and collapse ourselves. Who's turned us round like this, so that we always, do what we may, retain the attitude of someone who's departing? Just as he, on the last hill, that shows him all his valley for the last time, will turn and stop and linger, we live our lives, for ever taking leave. Votes: 0

And when suddenly the god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry, uttered the words: "˜He has turned round' "“ she comprehended nothing and said softly: "˜Who? Votes: 0

And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it. Votes: 0

And you suddenly know: It was here! You pull yourself together, and there stands an irrevocable year of anguish and vision and prayer. Votes: 0

And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers-perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life. Votes: 0

Animals see the unobstructed world with their whole eyes. But our eyes, turned back upon themselves, encircle and seek to snare the world, setting traps for freedom. Votes: 0

Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature. Votes: 0

Art too is just a way of living. Votes: 0

As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build... Votes: 0

As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. Votes: 0

As the arrow endures the string, and in the gathering momentum becomes more than itself. Because to stay is to be nowhere. Votes: 0

Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write [create]? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. Votes: 0

At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost. Votes: 0

Avoid providing material for the drama that is always stretched tight between parents and children; it uses up much of the children's strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn't comprehend. Don't ask for advice from them and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is strength and blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it. Votes: 0

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive. Votes: 0

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you. Votes: 0

Be forever dead in Eurydice-more gladly arise into the seamless life proclaimed in your song. Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days, be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang. Votes: 0

Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you. Votes: 0

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Votes: 0

Be patient with all that is uncertain in your heart...do not search for answers, which will not be given: you will not be able to live them, and its importat to live everything. Votes: 0

Be patient with all that is unsolved in your life. Learn to love the questions themselves, until some distant day, without your knowing, you will have lived into the answers. Votes: 0

Be, in this immensity of night, the magic force at your sense's crossroad... Votes: 0

Be-and yet know the great void where all things begin, the infinite source of your own most intense vibration, so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent. Votes: 0

Beauty is only the start of bearable terror. Votes: 0

Bound by conventions, people tend to reach for what is easy. Here we must be unafraid of what is difficult. For all living beings in nature must unfold in their particular way and become themselves despite all opposition. Votes: 0

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Votes: 0

But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is-solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves. Votes: 0

But there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere. Votes: 0

But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths. Votes: 0

Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way-and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children. Votes: 0

Comfort me from wherever you are"“alone, we are quickly worn out; if I place my head on the road, let it seem softened by you. Could it be that even from afar we offer each other a gentle breath? Votes: 0

Death is the side of life which is turned away from us. Votes: 0

Deeply I go down into myself. My god is Dark and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence. Votes: 0

Describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty-describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory. Votes: 0

Dig deep into your heart, where the answer spreads its roots in your being, and ask yourself solemnly, Must I write? Votes: 0

Do not allow yourself to be misled by the surfaces of things Votes: 0

Do not be bewildered by the surfaces: in the depths all becomes law. Votes: 0

Do not, do not, do not books for ever hammer at people like perpetual bells? When, between two books, silent sky appears: be glad Votes: 0

Do you recall, from your childhood on, how very much this life of yours has longed for greatness? I see it now, how from the vantage point of greatness it longs for even greater greatness. That is why it does not let up being difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow. Votes: 0

Do you remember how life yearned out of childhood toward the "great thing?" I see that it is now yearning forth beyond the great thing toward the greater one. Votes: 0

Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you. Votes: 0

Don't observe yourself too closely. Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Votes: 0

Don't take my devils away, because my angels may flee too. Votes: 0

Draw near to Nature. Then try like some first human being to say what you see and experience and love and lose. Votes: 0

Dying is strange and hard if it is not our death, but a death that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none within us. Votes: 0

Earth, is not this what you will: in us to rise up invisible? Is it, O Earth, not your dream once to be wholly invisible? Earth! Invisible! What, if not change, is your desperate mission? Votes: 0

Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant... Votes: 0

Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive. Votes: 0

Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn't intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom. Votes: 0

Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again. But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the earth, seems irrevocable. Votes: 0

Everything in the world of things and animals is still filled with happening, which you can take part in. Votes: 0

Everything terrible is something that needs our love. Votes: 0

Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good. Votes: 0

Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you. Seal my ears, I'll go on hearing you. And without feet I can make my way to you, without a mouth I can swear your name. Break off my arms, I'll take hold of you with my heart as with a hand. Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat. And if you consume my brain with fire, I'll feel you burn in every drop of my blood. Votes: 0

FALLING STARS: Do you remember still the falling stars that like swift horses through the heavens raced and suddenly leaped across the hurdles of our wishes -- do you recall? And we did make so many! For there were countless numbers of stars: each time we looked above we were astounded by the swiftness of their daring play, while in our hearts we felt safe and secure watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate, knowing somehow we had survived their fall. Votes: 0

Fame "” the aggregate of all the misunderstandings that collect around a new name. Votes: 0

Fame is the sum of the misunderstanding that gathers about a new name. Votes: 0

Fame, that public destruction of one in process of becoming, into whose building-ground the mob breaks, displacing his stones. Votes: 0

Fig tree, how long it's been full meaning for me, the way you almost entirely omit to flower and into the seasonably-resolute fruit uncelebratedly thrust your purest secret. Like the tube of a fountain, your bent bough drives the sap downwards and up: and it leaps from its sleep, scarce waking, into the joy of its sweetest achievement. Votes: 0

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. Votes: 0

For bel.i.eve me, the more one is, the richer is all one experiences. And whoever wants to have deep love in his life must collect and save for it and gather honey. Votes: 0

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other."¨This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess. Votes: 0

For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breathe ourselves out and away; with each new heartfire we give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us: you're in my blood, this room, Spring itself is filled with you . . . To what end? He can't hold us, we vanish within him and around him. Votes: 0

For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences. Votes: 0

Girls, there are poets who learn from you to say, what you, in your aloneness, are; and they learn through you to live distantness, as the evenings through the great stars become accustomed to eternity. Votes: 0

Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows. Votes: 0

Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside Votes: 0

Go into yourself. Dig into yourself for a deep answer Votes: 0

Go on loving what is good, simple, and ordinary. Votes: 0

God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. Votes: 0

God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don't let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand. Votes: 0

God... sat down for a moment when the dog was finished in order to watch it... and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it could not have been made better. Votes: 0

Harshness vanished. A sudden softness has replaced the meadows' wintry grey. Little rivulets of water changed their singing accents. Tendernesses, hesitantly, reach toward the earth from space, and country lanes are showing these unexpected subtle risings that find expression in the empty trees. Votes: 0

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Do not despair if the answers don't come immediately. Some answers are only revealed with the passage of time. Votes: 0

He does not always remain bent over the pages; he often leans back and closes his eyes over a line he has been reading again, and its meaning spreads through his blood. Votes: 0

He was a worker whose only desire was to penetrate with all his forces into the humble and difficult significance of his tools. Therein lay a certain renunciation of Life, but in just this renunciation lay his triumph, for Life entered into his work. Votes: 0

He who does not at some time, with definite determination consent to the terribleness of life, or even exalt in it, never takes possession of the inexpressible fullness of the power of our existence. Votes: 0

He who understands one thing understands everything, for the same laws are in all. Votes: 0

His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world. As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed. Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly. An image enters in, rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone. Votes: 0

How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things? Votes: 0

How I will cherish you then, you grief-torn nights! Had I only received you, inconsolable sisters, on more abject knees, only buried myself with more abandon in your loosened hair. How we waste our afflictions! We study them, stare out beyond them into bleak continuance, hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas they're really our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one of the seasons of the clandestine year -- ; not only a season --: they're site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode. Votes: 0

Huge lemons, cut in slices, would sink like setting suns into the dusky sea, softly illuminating it with their radiating membranes, and its clear, smooth surface aquiver from the rising bitter essence. Votes: 0

I am a house gutted by fire where only the guilty sometimes sleep before the punishment that devours them hounds them out in the open. Votes: 0

I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of... What's the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I'm changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am something else, it's obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can't possibly write to strangers. Votes: 0

I am like a child who awakes At the light, so safe and secureFree from night's fears when dawn breaks, In Thee I am ever secure. Votes: 0

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough Votes: 0

I am so afraid of people's words.They describe so distinctly everything: And this they call dog and that they call house, here the start and there the end. I worry about their mockery with words, they know everything, what will be, what was; no mountain is still miraculous; and their house and yard lead right up to God. I want to warn and object: Let the things be! I enjoy listening to the sound they are making. But you always touch: and they hush and stand still. That's how you kill. Votes: 0

I am so glad you are here. It helps me realize how beautiful my world is. Votes: 0

I am the rest between two notes which are somehow always in discord. Votes: 0

I am too alone in the world and not alone enough to make every moment holy. Votes: 0

I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life... Votes: 0

I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Votes: 0

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken. Votes: 0

I believe that nothing that is real can pass away. Votes: 0

I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth. Votes: 0

I do not want to be folded for where I am folded, there I am a lie. Votes: 0

I don't want to stand before you like a thing, shrewd, secretive. I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will, as it goes toward action. And in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times, when something is coming near, I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone. I want to unfold. I don't want to be folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie. Votes: 0

I feel it now: there's a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has need me.. Votes: 0

I have patience for centuries in me and will live as though my time were very big. Votes: 0

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each shall stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation. Votes: 0

I implore those who love me to love my solitude. Votes: 0

I know of no other advice than this: Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth. Votes: 0

I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything! Votes: 0

I live my life in widening circle That reach out across the world. I may not ever complete the last one, But I give myself to it. I circle around God, that primordial tower. I have been circling for thousands of years, And I still don't know: am I a falcon, A storm, or a great song? [I, 2] Votes: 0

I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future. Votes: 0

I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood. Votes: 0

I never read anything concerning my work. I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is not directed to him, does not have to open and read. Votes: 0

I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all. Votes: 0

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone. Votes: 0

I want to love the things as no one has thought to love them. Votes: 0

I want to unfold. I don't want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie. Votes: 0

I want to unfold. I don't want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie, and I want my grasp of things to be true. I want to describe myself like a painting that I looked at closely for a long time, like a saying that I finally understood, like the pitcher I use every day, like the face of my mother, like a ship that carried me through the wildest storm of all. Votes: 0

I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false... Votes: 0

I would like to sing someone to sleep, to sit beside someone and be there. I would like to rock you and sing softly and go with you to and from sleep. I would like to be the one in the house who knew: The night was cold. And I would like to listen in and listen out into you, into the world, into the woods. The clocks shout to one another striking, and one sees to the bottom of time. And down below one last, strange man walks by and rouses a strange dog. And after that comes silence. I have laid my eyes upon you wide; and they hold you gently and let you go when something stirs in the dark. Votes: 0

I would like to step out of my heart and go walking beneath the enormous sky. Votes: 0

Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition. Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will find them transformed like the beautiful gold in the fairy tale which cannot remain gold because some small detail was not taken care of. Votes: 0

If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself. Votes: 0

If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. Votes: 0

If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. Votes: 0

If the angel deigns to come it will be because you have convinced her, not by tears but by your humble resolve to be always beginning; to be a beginner. Votes: 0

If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better. Votes: 0

If there is nothing you can share with other people, try to be close to Things, they will not abandon you; and the nights are still here and the winds that move through the trees and across many lands; everything in the world of Things and animals is still filled with happening, which you can take part in; Votes: 0

If we only arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Votes: 0

If we surrendered to earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees. Instead we entangle ourselves in knots of our own making and struggle, lonely and confused. So like children, we begin again... to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly. (from the poem "How Sure Gravity's Law") Votes: 0

If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor, then everything will become easier for you. Votes: 0

If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance. Votes: 0

If your everyday life appears to be unworthy subject matter, do not complain to life. Complain to yourself, Lament that you are not poet enough to call up its wealth. Votes: 0

If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing . . . then you are a writer. Votes: 0

In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive, filling it with sublimity and exaltation. Votes: 0

In the depths all becomes law. Votes: 0

In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Votes: 0

In the night, I wish to speak with the angel to find out if she recognizes my eyes, if she will ask me: do you see Eden? And I'll reply: Eden burns. Votes: 0

In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn't matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn't force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything! Votes: 0

Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walk only on feelings. That faces upward and in its mirror receives heavenly roads, which travel along themselves. That has learned to walk upon water when it scoops, that walks upon wells, transfiguring every path. That steps into other hands, changes those that are like it into a landscape: wanders and arrives within them, fills them with arrival. Votes: 0

Irony: Don't let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments. Votes: 0

Is not impermanence the very fragrance of our days? Votes: 0

It is clear that we must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance. Votes: 0

it is clear that we must trust what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it. Votes: 0

It is good to say it aloud: 'Nothing has happened.' Once again: 'Nothing has happened.' Does that help?" Votes: 0

It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical will live the relation to another as something alive. Votes: 0

It is part of the nature of every definitive love that sooner or later it can reach the beloved only in infinity. Votes: 0

It is possible I am pushing through solid rock, like the vein of ore encased, alone. I am such a long way in I can see no way through and no space. Everything is close to my face and everything close to my face is stone. I don't have much knowledge yet in grief, so this darkness makes me feel small. You, be the Master; Make yourself fierce; break in. And then your great transforming will happen to me And my great grief cry will happen to you. Votes: 0

It is so often on the name of a misdeed that a life goes to pieces, not the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a perfectly definite necessity of that life and would have been absorbed by it without effort. Votes: 0

It is true that these mysteries are dreadful, and people have always drawn away from them. But where can we find anything sweet and glorious that would never wear this mask, the mask of the dreadful? Whoever does not, sometimes or other, give his full consent, his full and joyous consent to the dreadfulness of life, can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence; can only walk on its edge, and one day, when the judgment is given, will have been neither alive nor dead. Votes: 0

It seems to me that the only way one can be helpful is to extend one's hand to someone else involuntarily, and without ever knowing how useful this will be. Votes: 0

It wasn't his, it wasn't my fault, we both had nothing except patience, but Death has none. I saw him come (how meanly!) and I watched him as he took and took: none of it I could claim as mine. Votes: 0

It's possible, I'm moving through the hard veins of heavy mountains, like an arc, alone; I'm so deep inside, I see no end in sight, and no distance: everything is getting near and everything near is turning to stone. Votes: 0

Joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness. Votes: 0

Just keep going - no feeling is final. Votes: 0

Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer. Votes: 0

Learn to love the questions themselves. Votes: 0

Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything. Votes: 0

Let your beauty manifest itself without talking and calculation."‹ You are silent. It says for you: I am. And comes in meaning thousandfold"‹, comes at long last over everyone. Votes: 0

Life - a sexually transmitted terminal condition. Votes: 0

Life + a cat ... adds up to an incalculable sum. Votes: 0

Life and death: they are one, at core entwined. Who understands himself from his own strain presses himself into a drop of wine and throws himself into the purest flame. Votes: 0

Life is cut to allow for growth ... one may vigorously put on weight before one fills it out entirely. Votes: 0

Life is heavier than the weight of all things. Votes: 0

Live the questions now. Votes: 0

Look, we don't love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms. Votes: 0

Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation. When something's let go of, it circles; and though we are rarely the center of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve. Votes: 0

Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and great each other. Votes: 0

Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in the hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away. Votes: 0

Love the questions themselves...Live the questions now and have confidence that someday far into the future, [I will live my] way into the answer. Votes: 0

Love the questions, themselves. Votes: 0

May I strike my heart's keys clearly, and may none fail because of slack, uncertain, or fraying strings. May the tears that stream down my face make me more radiant: may my hidden weeping bloom.... How we waste our afflictions!... [T]hey're really our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one of the seasons of the clandestine year"”; not only a season"”: they're site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode. Votes: 0

May you find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith... Votes: 0

May you gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people. Votes: 0

More unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life. Votes: 0

most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. Votes: 0

Most people have turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it. Votes: 0

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings. You language where all language ends. You time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts. Votes: 0

My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing. Votes: 0

My eyes already touch the sunny hill. Going far ahead of the road I have begun. So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp; it has inner light, even from a distance- and charges us, even if we do not reach it, into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are; a gesture waves us on answering our own wave... but what we feel is the wind in our faces. Votes: 0

My life is not this steeply sloping hour, in which you see me hurrying. Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree; I am only one of my many mouths, and at that, the one that will be still the soonest. I am the rest between two notes, which are somehow always in discord because Death's note wants to climb over"” but in the dark interval, reconciled, they stay there trembling. And the song goes on, beautiful. Votes: 0

My loving friend, you see, my life was never given a foundation, no one was able to imagine what it would want to become. In Venice there stands the so-called Ca del Duca, a princely foundation, on which later the most wretched tenement came to be built. With me it's the opposite: the beautiful arched elevations of my spirit rest on the most tentative beginning; a wooden scaffolding, a few boards....Is that why I feel inhibited in raising the nave, the tower to which the weight of the great bells is to be hoisted (by angels, who else could do it)? Votes: 0

Nearly everything that matters is a challenge, and everything matters. Votes: 0

Never has grief been possessed, never has love been learned, and what removes us in death is not revealed. Votes: 0

No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others Votes: 0

No one can advise and help you, no one. There is only one way: go within. Votes: 0

No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write, find out wether it spreading out its root in the deepest places of your heart...Delve into yourself for a deep answer Votes: 0

No, no, one can imagine nothing in the world, not the least thing. Everything is composed of so many isolated details that are not to be foreseen. In one's imagining one passes over them and hasty as one is doesn't notice that they are missing. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed. Votes: 0

No, we don't accomplish our love in a single year as the flowers do; an immemorial sap flows up through our arms when we love. Dear girl, this: that we loved, inside us, not One who would someday appear, but seething multitudes; not just a single child, but also the fathers lying in our depths like fallen mountains; also the dried-up riverbeds of ancient mothers-;also the whole soundless landscape under the clouded or clear sky of its destiny -; all this, my dear, preceded you. Votes: 0

Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly. Votes: 0

Nothing strange should befall us, but only that which has long belonged to us. We will gradually learn to realize that that which we call destiny goes forth from within people, not from without into them. Votes: 0

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism. Votes: 0

Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Votes: 0

Now for some heartwork. Votes: 0

O how all things are far removed and long have passed away. I do believe the star, whose light my face reflects, is dead and has been so for many thousand years. I had a vision of a passing boat and heard some voices saying disquieting things. I heard a clock strike in some distant house... but in which house?... I long to quiet my anxious heart and stand beneath the sky's immensity. I long to pray... And one of all the stars must still exist. I do believe that I would know which one alone endured, and which like a white city stands at the ray's end shining in the heavens. Votes: 0

Of all my books, I find only a few indispensible. Votes: 0

One moment your life is a stone in you, and the next moment a star! Votes: 0

One of the most difficult tests for the creator: he must always remain unconscious, unaware of his best virtues, if he doesn't want to rob them of their candor and innocence. Votes: 0

Only the individual who is solitary is like a thing placed under profound laws, and when he goes out into the morning that is just beginning, or looks out into the evening that is full of happening, and if he feels what is going on there, then all status drops from him as from a dead man, though he stands in the midst of sheer life. Votes: 0

Only those sadnesses are dangerous and bad which one carries about among people in order to drown them out. Votes: 0

Our being is continually undergoing and entering upon changes. ... We must, strictly speaking, at every moment give each other up and let each other go and not hold each other back. Votes: 0

Our task is to listen to the news that is always arriving out of silence. Votes: 0

Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being. Votes: 0

People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. Votes: 0

Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance. Votes: 0

Perhaps everything terrifying is deep down a helpless thing that needs our help. Votes: 0

Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. Votes: 0

Perhaps the great renewal of the world will consist of this, that man and woman, freed of all confused feelings and desires, shall no longer seek each other as opposites, but simply as members of a family and neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to simply, earnestly, patiently, and jointly bear the heavy responsibility of sexuality that has been entrusted to them. Votes: 0

Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, seperate, in the evening. Votes: 0

Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And not our acceptance of it is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments. Votes: 0

Poetic power is great, strong as a primitive instinct; it has its own unyielding rhythms in itself and breaks out as out of mountains. Votes: 0

Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine. In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there. And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am. Votes: 0

Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Votes: 0

Religion is something infinitely simple, ingenuous. It is not knowledge, not content of feeling... it is not duty and not renunciation, it is not restriction: but in the infinite extent of the universe it is a direction of the heart. Votes: 0

Resolve to be always beginning-to be a beginner! Votes: 0

Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy of being No-one's sleep under so many lids. Votes: 0

Sex is difficult, yes. But they are difficult things with which we have been charged...If you only recognize this and manage out of yourself, out of your own nature and ways, out of your own experience and childhood and strength to achieve a relation to sex wholly your own (not influenced by convention and custom) then you need no longer be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your best possession. Votes: 0

Shattered people are best represented by bits and pieces. Votes: 0

She followed slowly, taking a long time, As though there were some obstacles in the way; And yet: as though, once it was overcome, She would be beyond all walking, and would fly. Votes: 0

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads Of her life, and weaves them gratefully Into a single cloth "“ It's she who drives the loudmouths from the hall And clears it for a different celebration. Votes: 0

Since I've learned to be silent, everything has come so much closer to me. Votes: 0

So it's back once more, back up the slope. Why do they always ruin my rope with their cuts? I felt so ready the other day, Had a real foretaste of eternity In my guts. Spoonfeeding me yet another sip from life's cup. I don't want it, won't take any more of it. Let me throw up. Life is medium rare and good, I see, And the world full of soup and bread, But it won't pass into the blood for me, Just goes to my head. It makes me ill, though others it feeds; Do see that I must deny it! For a thousand years from now at least I'm keeping a diet. Votes: 0

So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in. Votes: 0

So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp. Votes: 0

So you mustn't be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety - like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in the palm of its hand and will not let you fall. Votes: 0

Society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are. Votes: 0

Solitude is nothing that one can choose or retrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. Votes: 0

Some day when I lose you, will you still be able to sleep, without me to whisper over you like a crown of linden branches? Votes: 0

Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being. Votes: 0

Sometime we will have to stop overevaluating the word. We shall learn to realize that it is only one of the many bridges that connect the island of our soul with the great continent of common life. . . the broadest, perhaps, but in no way the most refined. Votes: 0

sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East. And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead. And another man, who remains inside his own house, stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses, so that his children have to go far out into the world toward that same church, which he forgot. Votes: 0

Somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work. Help me in saying it, to understand it. Votes: 0

Space for the Spirit to breathe. Votes: 0

Spring has again returned. The Earth is like a child that knows many poems. Many, O so many. For the hardship of such long learning she receives the prize. Strict was her teacher. The white in the old man's beard pleases us. Now, what to call green, to call blue, we dare to ask: She knows, She knows! Votes: 0

Stand up during supper and walk outdoors, and keep on walking. Votes: 0

Strangely, I heard a stranger say, I am with you. Votes: 0

Success, which is something so simple in the end, is made up of thousands of things, we never fully know what. Votes: 0

Swells, Marina? we ocean, depths, Marina? we sky! Votes: 0

Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns. Votes: 0

That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called "visions," the whole so-called "spirit-world," death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God. Votes: 0

That is longing: To dwell in the flux of things, To have no home in the present. And these are wishes: gentle dialogues Of the poor hours with eternity. Votes: 0

That is the principal thing-not to remain with the dream, with the intention, with the being-in-the-mood, but always forcibly to convert it all into things. Votes: 0

That's love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other. Votes: 0

The artist's experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss. Votes: 0

The artist's task consists of making one thing of many, and a world from the smallest part of a thing. Votes: 0

The creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted. Votes: 0

The deep parts of my life pour onward, as if the river shores were opening out. I feel closer to what language can't reach. With my senses, as with birds, I climb into the windy heaven... in the ponds broken off from the sky. . . Votes: 0

The flower bends when the wind wants it to, and you must become like that-that is, filled with deep #"Ž trust . Votes: 0

The future must enter you long before it happens. Votes: 0

The hero is strangely akin to those who die young. Votes: 0

The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person's solitude. Votes: 0

the knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance. Votes: 0

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,as if orchards were dying high in space.Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."And tonight the heavy earth is fallingaway from all other stars in the loneliness.We're all falling. This hand here is falling.And look at the other one. It's in them all.And yet there is Someone, whose handsinfinitely calm, holding up all this falling. Votes: 0

the longer I live, the more necessary it seems to me to endure, to copy the whole dictation of existence to the end, for it might be that only the last sentence contains that small, perhaps inconspicuous word through which all laboriously learned and not understood orients itself toward glorious sense. Votes: 0

The moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing. Votes: 0

The most visible joy can only reveal itself to us when we've transformed it, within. Votes: 0

The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise... Votes: 0

The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. Votes: 0

The point is to live everything. Votes: 0

The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate. Votes: 0

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat held for it by a row of ancient trees; you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight, one journeying to heaven, one that falls; and leave you, not at home in either one, not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses, not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes a star each night, and rises; and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel) your life, with its immensity and fear, so that, now bounded, now immeasurable it is alternately stone in you and star. Votes: 0

The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you. Votes: 0

There are moments in which a rose is more important than a piece of bread Votes: 0

There are quite a number of people in the reading-room; but one is not aware of them. They are inside the books. They move, sometimes, within the pages like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading. Votes: 0

There exists a creature which is perfectly harmless; when it passes before your eyes you scarcely notice it and forget it again immediately. But as soon as it invisibly gets somehow into your ears, it develops there, it hatches, as it were, and cases have been known where it was penetrated even into the brain and has thriven devastatingly in that organ, like those pneumococci in dogs that gain entrance through the nose.This creature is one's neighbor. Votes: 0

There is only one journey. Going inside yourself. Votes: 0

There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along.... Votes: 0

There is time only to work slowly There is no time not to love Votes: 0

They, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time. Votes: 0

Think... of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it. Votes: 0

Think... of the world you carry within you. Votes: 0

This above all-ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple "I must," then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. Then draw near to Nature. Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose. Votes: 0

This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. Votes: 0

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love; the more they give, the more they possess of that precious nourishing love from which flowers and children have their strength and which could help all human beings if they would take it without doubting. Votes: 0

Those doves below, the ones utterly cared for, never endangered ones, cannot know tenderness. Votes: 0

Those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious. Votes: 0

Thus we live, forever taking leave. Votes: 0

To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb creatures in the world's full reserve, the unsayable sums, joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count. Votes: 0

To be an artist means not to compute or count... Votes: 0

To be here is immense. Votes: 0

To be in circumstances that are working upon us, that from time to time place us in front of great natural Things - that is all we need. Votes: 0

To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure. Votes: 0

To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one. Votes: 0

To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation...Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things. Votes: 0

To work is to live without dying. Votes: 0

Trees do not force their sap, nor does the flower push its bloom. Votes: 0

True singing is a different breath, about nothing. Votes: 0

Truly it is glorious, our being here. Votes: 0

Truly to sing, that is a different breath. Votes: 0

Und dasTotsein ist mu« hsam und voller Nachholn, dass man allm a« hlich ein wenig Ewigkeit spu« rt. And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity. Votes: 0

Wanting to change, to improve, a person's situation means offering him, for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced, other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered. Votes: 0

we are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. ... It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again "invisibly," inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible. Votes: 0

We are not allowed to linger, even with what is most intimate. Votes: 0

We are the bees of the invisible. We madly gather the honey of the visible to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible. Votes: 0

We are unutterably alone essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important. Votes: 0

We discover that we do not know our role; we look for a mirror; we want to remove our make-up and take off what is false and real. But somewhere a piece of disguise that we forgot still sticks to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our mouth are bent. And so we walk around, a mockery and a mere half: neither having achieved being nor actors. Votes: 0

We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them.... Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. Votes: 0

We ignore the gods and fill our minds with trash. Votes: 0

We make our way through Everything like thread passing through fabric, giving shape to images that we ourselves do not know. Votes: 0

We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. Votes: 0

We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard - of, must be possible in it. This is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most inexplicable. Votes: 0

We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it. Votes: 0

Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divinings, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent. Votes: 0

weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you going and coming and often staying all night.)"¦ Votes: 0

What batters you becomes your strength. Votes: 0

What do the contours of your body mean, laid out like the lines on a hand, so that I no longer see them except as fate? Votes: 0

What else can I tell you? It seems to me that everything has its proper emphasis; and finally I want to add just one more bit of advice: to keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your whole development; you couldn't disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to questions that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer. Votes: 0

What happens most deeply inside you is worthy of your whole love. Votes: 0

What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love. Votes: 0

What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours-that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child ... Votes: 0

What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude. Votes: 0

What we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. Votes: 0

What we do battle with is so small, what battles us is so large... Votes: 0

What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things Votes: 0

Where I create, there I am true. Votes: 0

Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand already quite near its transformation. Votes: 0

Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury, are beginning to grow lazy and indifferent; the desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare. In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one's own. Votes: 0

Who speaks of conquering? To endure is everything. Votes: 0

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'hierarchies? and even if one of thempressed me against his heart: I would be consumedin that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothingbut the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,and we are so awed because it serenely disdainsto annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying. Votes: 0

Whoever makes himself freer and more human in his own existence is doing his part towards peace. Votes: 0

Whoever you are: in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything; yours is the last house before the far-off: whoever you are. With your eyes, which in their weariness barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold, you lift very slowly one black tree and place it against the sky: slender, alone. And you have made the world. And it is huge and like a word which grows ripe in silence. And as your will seizes on its meaning, tenderly your eyes let it go... Votes: 0

Why don't you conceive of God as an ally who is coming, who has been approaching since time began, the one who will someday arrive, the fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? Why not project his birth into the future, and live your life as an excruciating and lyrical moment in the history of a prodigious pregnancy? Votes: 0

Why don't you think of [God] as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity... the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are. Votes: 0

Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by greater and greater beings. Votes: 0

Wishes are recollections coming from the future. Votes: 0

with poems one accomplishes so little when one writes them early. One should hold off and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, right at the end, one could perhaps write ten lines that are good. Votes: 0

Works of art always spring from those who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go. The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes. Votes: 0

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Votes: 0

Works of Art are of an infinite loneliness. Votes: 0

Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them. Votes: 0

Yet everything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin's bow, which draws one voice out of two separate strings. Votes: 0

You are also the physician who must watch over yourself. But in the course of every illness there are many days in which the physician can do nothing but wait. Votes: 0

You are nearing the land that is life; you will recognize it by its seriousness. Votes: 0

you are not too old and it is not too late to dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out it's own secret Votes: 0

You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world, for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone, and then no one outside learns of you. But the darkness pulls in everything: shapes and fires, animals and myself, how easily it gathers them! - powers and people - and it is possible a great energy is moving near me. I have faith in nights. Votes: 0

You have had many and great sadnesses, which passed. And you say that even this passing was hard for you and put you out of sorts. But, please, consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change when you were sad? Votes: 0

You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. ... But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you [that is, passed through you]. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. Votes: 0

You life will find its own paths... and that they be good, rich, and wide is what I wish for you, more than I can say. Votes: 0

You must change your life. Votes: 0

You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Votes: 0

You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the the hour of the new clarity. Votes: 0

You must realise that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Votes: 0

You see, I want a lot. Perhaps I want everything the darkness that comes with every infinite fall and the shivering blaze of every step up. So many live on and want nothing And are raised to the rank of prince By the slippery ease of their light judgments But what you love to see are faces that do work and feel thirst. You love most of all those who need you as they need a crowbar or a hoe. You have not grown old, and it is not too late To dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out its own secret. Votes: 0

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing That is more than your own. Let it brush your cheeks As it divides and rejoins behind you. The trees you planted in childhood have grown Too heavy. You cannot bring them along. Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold. Votes: 0

You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house-- , and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,-- you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening... Votes: 0

You, darkness, of whom I am born- I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes the rest. Votes: 0

You, God, who live next door-- If at times, through the long night, I trouble you with my urgent knocking-- this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom. I know you're all alone in that room. If you should be thirsty, there's no one to get you a glass of water. I wait listening, always. Just give me a sign! I'm right here... Sen komşu tanrı, Uzun geceler bazen, Kapına vura vura uyandırıyorsam seni Solumanı seyrek duyduğumdandır... Bilirim, yalnızsın odanda. Sana birşey gerekse kimse yok, Bir yudum su versin aradığında. Hep dinlerim, yeter ki bir ses edin, Öyle yakınım sana... Votes: 0

Your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Votes: 0

Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you've learned, but in the questions you've learned how to ask yourself. Votes: 0

Your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance. Votes: 0