Think... of the world which you carry within yourself... and set it above everything that you notice about you. Your inmost happening is worth your whole love, that is what you must somehow work at, and not loose too much time and too much courage in explaining your attitude to people.
What an unilateral life, when from the material of a renunciation, we must fashion something we love.
The comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead of possession one learns connection.
Let me put aside every desire, so that my heart grows used to its farthest spaces. Better that it live fully aware, in the terror of its stars, than as if protected, soothed by what is near.
Je mehr Liebe man gibt, desto mehr besitzt man davon.
Ist dir Trinken bitter, werde Wein.
Verweilung, auch am Verstrautesten nicht, ist uns gegeben.
And yet they are in us, those who have long since passed away, as natural disposition, as burden on our destiny, as blood that throbs, and as gesture that rises up out of the depths of time.
Everywhere I am folded, there I am a lie.
Do you remember how this life of yours longed in childhood to belong to the grown-ups? I can see that it now longs to move on from them and is drawn to those who are greater yet. That is why it does not cease to be difficult, but also why it will not cease to grow.
Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.
The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude.
It seems to me that the only way one can be helpful is to extend one’s hand to someone else involuntarily, and without ever knowing how useful this will be.
This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.
And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.
Being an artist means not reckoning and counting, but ripening like a tree which does not force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer.
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart...
Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.
Let everything happen to you: Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.
For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.