As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still, it is we who move in infinite space.
More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed.
May you gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people.
Wanting to change, to improve, a person’s situation means offering him, for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced, other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered.
Somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work. Help me in saying it, to understand it.
When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.
We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen.
I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
Do not allow yourself to be misled by the surfaces of things.
Who has not sat before his own heart’s curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.
Our deepest fears are like dragons, guarding our deepest treasure.
Most people have turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it.
If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.
There are moments in which a rose is more important than a piece of bread.
He was a worker whose only desire was to penetrate with all his forces into the humble and difficult significance of his tools. Therein lay a certain renunciation of Life, but in just this renunciation lay his triumph, for Life entered into his work.
Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation. When something’s let go of, it circles; and though we are rarely the center of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve.
Live the questions now.
But you, divine poet, you sang on till the end as the swarm of rejected maenads attacked you, shrieking, you overpowered their noise with harmony, and from pure destruction arose your transfigured song.
This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us.
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Do not despair if the answers don’t come immediately. Some answers are only revealed with the passage of time.