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.
Be, in this immensity of night, the magic force at your sense’s crossroad...
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.
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.
Our task is to listen to the news that is always arriving out of silence.
Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.
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.
Since I’ve learned to be silent, everything has come so much closer to me.
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.