Do not believe that the person who is trying to offer you solace lives his life effortlessly among the simple and quiet words that might occasionally comfort you. His life is filled with much hardship and sadness, and it remains far behind yours. But if it were otherwise, he could never have found these words.
And more than that: you are also the doctor responsible for looking after himself. But with all illnesses there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait.
Even on days when fate wishes to bestow boundless gifts on them, most people make mistakes in accepting: they don’t accept straightforwardly and consequently lose something while doing so, they take with a secondary purpose in mind, or they accept what is given to them as if they were being compensated for something else.
If two people managed not to get stuck in hatred during their honest struggles with each other, that is, in the edges of their passion that became ragged and sharp when it cooled and set, if they could stay fluid, active, flexible, and changeable in all of their interactions and relations, and, in a word, if a mutually human and friendly consideration remained available to them, then their decision to separate cannot easily conjure disaster and terror.
One has to be able at every moment to place one’s hand on the earth like the first human being.
I’m learning how to see. I don’t know what the reason is, but everything enters into me more deeply and no longer stops at the point where it used to come to an end. I have an inner self that I knew nothing about. Now everything goes into it. I don’t know what happens there.
Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!
Doch wie ich mich auch in mich selber neige: Mein Gott ist dunkel und wie ein Gewebe von hundert Wurzeln, welche schweigsam trinken.
There is but one solitude, and that is great and not easy to bear, and to almost everybody come hours when they would gladly exchange it for any sort of intercourse, however banal and cheap, for the semblance of some slight accord with the first comer, with the unworthiest... But perhaps those are the very hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of springtimes.
The world of sexuality it finds is not entirely mature and pure, it is not human enough, only virile, rut, intoxication, restlessness, and weighed down by the old prejudices and arrogance with which men have disfigured and overburdened love.
Is it not peculiar that nearly all of the great philosophers and psychologists have always paid attention to the earth and nothing but the earth? Would it not be more sublime to lift our eyes from this crumb, and instead of considering a speck of dust in the universe, to turn our attention to space itself?
If, however, he is the most perfect one, would not what is less than perfect precede him, so that he can choose himself from great abundance?
The more one is, the more abundant is everything one experiences. If you want to have a deep love in your life, you must save up for it and collect and gather honey.
What goes on in your innermost being is worth all your love, this is what you must work on however you can and not waste too much time and too much energy on clarifying your attitude to other people.
Don’t you see how everything that happens is always a beginning again, and could it not be His beginning, given that beginnings are in themselves always so beautiful?
Never forget to make a wish, Malte. You should never give up wishing. I believe there is no such thing as fulfillment, but there are wishes, and they go on lasting, your whole lifetime, so that you couldn’t wait long enough for them to be fulfilled even if you wanted to.
Eating, too, has been turned away from its true nature: want on the one hand and superfluity on the other have troubled the clarity of this need, and all the profound, simple necessities in which life renews itself have similarly been obscured.
To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil.
A world will come over you, the happiness, the abundance, the incomprehensible immensity of a world. Live a while in these books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be repaid you a thousand and a thousand times, and however your life may turn, – it will, I am certain of it, run through the fabric of your growth as one of the most important threads among all the threads of your experience, disappointments and joys.
But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence.