So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.
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.
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.
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.
Resolve to be always beginning-to be a beginner!
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.
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.
We ignore the gods and fill our minds with trash.
Trees do not force their sap, nor does the flower push its bloom.
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
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.
I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.
Whoever makes himself freer and more human in his own existence is doing his part towards peace.
And you suddenly know: It was here! You pull yourself together, and there stands an irrevocable year of anguish and vision and prayer.
What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love.
Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings.
We are unutterably alone essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important.
Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good.
What we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us.
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.