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?
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.
Go into yourself. Dig into yourself for a deep answer.
To be an artist means not to compute or count...
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.
He who understands one thing understands everything, for the same laws are in all.
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.
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.
Speaking of August Rodin: He raised his world above us in an immense arc, and made it a part of nature.
Poetic power is great, strong as a primitive instinct; it has its own unyielding rhythms in itself and breaks out as out of mountains.
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.
Draw near to Nature. Then try like some first human being to say what you see and experience and love and lose.
In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive, filling it with sublimity and exaltation.
Life is heavier than the weight of all things.
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.
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.
The creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.
Across the moment, aeons speak with aeons. More than we experienced has gone by.
Fame, that public destruction of one in process of becoming, into whose building-ground the mob breaks, displacing his stones.
Be ahead of all farewells as if they were behind you, like the winter that is just departing.