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.
You must change your life.
No one can advise and help you, no one. There is only one way: go within.
Nearly everything that matters is a challenge, and everything matters.
Stand up during supper and walk outdoors, and keep on walking.
Go on loving what is good, simple, and ordinary.
Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings. You language where all language ends. You time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.
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.
Truly it is glorious, our being here.
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.
Painting is something that takes place among the colors.
If my devils are to leave me, I’m afraid my angels will take flight as well.
Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude – these are everything.
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.
Now for some heartwork.
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.
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.
The most visible joy can only reveal itself to us when we’ve transformed it, within.
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.
Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.