Don’t you see that everything that happens is always a beginning again.
Don’t petals of soft words float upon your blood?
Only in the realm of Praising should Lament walk, the naiad of the wept-for fountain, watching over the stream of our complaint, to keep it clear upon the very stone that bears the arch of triumph and the altar. –.
Nowhere, beloved, can world be but within us. Our life passes in transformation. And the external dwindles away.
Why should you want to exclude from your life all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit, when you don’t know what work it is these states are performing within you?
And those, who come together in the night and are twined in quivering pleasure, are performing a serious work and are heaping up sweetness, depth and force for the song of some coming poet, who will arise to express inexpressible ecstasies.
Things are not as easy to understand and say as we might prefer to believe; most events are inexpressible, happening in a space where no word has ever set foot, and most inexpressible of all are works of art, mysterious existences, whose life continues as ours passes away.
The future stands firm... but we move in infinite space.
I am still soft, and I can be like wax in your hands. Take me, give me a form, finish me.
For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed; it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.
I believe that almost all our sorrows are moments of tension which we experience as a paralysis, because we no longer hear our estranged feelings living. Because we are alone with the strange thing that has entered into us; because for a moment everything familiar and customary has been taken from us; because we stand in the middle of a crossing where we cannot remain standing.
How good it is to be among reading people. Why are they not always like that? You can go up to one of them and touch him lightly; he feels nothing. And if in rising, you chance to bump lightly against a neighbor and excuse yourself, he nods toward the side from which he hears your voice, his face turns toward you and does not see you, and his hair is like that of a man asleep. How comforting that is.
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?