We make our way through Everything like thread passing through fabric, giving shape to images that we ourselves do not know.
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.
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.
No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Do not, do not, do not books for ever hammer at people like perpetual bells? When, between two books, silent sky appears: be glad.
Of all my books, I find only a few indispensible.
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?
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.
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.
Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly.
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.
Is not impermanence the very fragrance of our days?
In the depths all becomes law.
Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you.
Irony: Don’t let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments.