Live for a while in these books, learn from them what you feel is worth learning, but most of all love them. This love will be returned to you thousands upon thousands of times, whatever your life may become – it will, I am sure, go through the while fabric of your becoming, as one of the most important threads among all the threads of your experiences, disappointments, and joys.
Whoever you are: in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything;.
Because he loves only as man, not as human being, there is in his sexual feelings something narrow, seemingly wild, malicious, temporal, finite, which weakens his art and makes it equivocal and dubious.
If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place. And even if you were in a prison whose walls did not let any sound of the world outside reach your senses – would you not have your childhood still, this marvellous, lavish source, this treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention towards that.
The main thing was to be living. That was the main thing.
Read the lines as if they were unknown to you, and you will feel in your inmost self how very much they are yours.
My old furniture is rotting in a barn where I was permitted to store it, and as for myself, dear God, I don’t have a roof over my head and it is raining into my eyes.
Somehow I had a premonition of what I so often felt at later times: that you did not have the right to open a single book unless you engaged to read them all. With every line you read, you were breaking off a portion of the world. Before books, the world was intact, and afterwards it might be restored to wholeness once again. But how was I, who could not read, to take up the challenge laid down by all of them?
You know that I am not one of those individuals who neglect their body in order to turn it into an offering for their soul; my soul would not at all have appreciated such a sacrifice.
If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place.
Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself.
Is it possible that despite our inventions and progress, despite our culture, religion and knowledge of the world, we have remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that even that surface, which might still have been something, has been covered with unbelievably boring material, leaving it looking like drawing-room furniture in the summer holidays.
Above all marriage is a new task and a new seriousness – a new challenge and a question regarding the strength and kindness of each participant and a new great danger for both.
Things are not all as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe; most events are unsayable. occur in a space that no word has ever penetrated.
And if there is one thing more that I must say to you, it is this: Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.
Perform no miracles for me, But justify Thy laws to me Which, as the years pass by me. All soundlessly unfold.
So whoever loves must try to act as if he had a great work: he must be much alone and go into himself and collect himself and hold fast to himself; he must work; he must become something!
We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. That is all.
It should either have passed away with my childhood, or my childhood should have flowed away from it later, leaving it behind, real among all the rest of reality, something to see and objectively tell, like a thing in Cezanne, incomprehensible for all I care, but tangible.
But everything that we encounter is so very much of one piece, and so intimately related to everything else, and has given birth to itself, grows, and is then raised so much to come into its own, that we basically just need to be there, if only unassumingly, if only authentically, the way the earth is there in its affirmation of the seasons, light and dark and wholly in space, longing to be supported by nothing but that web of influences and forces where the stars feel secure.