You are nearing the land that is life; you will recognize it by its seriousness.
That is the principal thing-not to remain with the dream, with the intention, with the being-in-the-mood, but always forcibly to convert it all into things.
That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.
Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant...
Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again. But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the earth, seems irrevocable.
How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?
It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
Don’t observe yourself too closely. Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen.
Dig deep into your heart, where the answer spreads its roots in your being, and ask yourself solemnly, Must I write?
A person isn’t who they are during the last conversation you had with them – they’re who they’ve been throughout your whole relationship.
Never believe fate is more than the condensation of childhood.
There is time only to work slowly There is no time not to love.
Some day when I lose you, will you still be able to sleep, without me to whisper over you like a crown of linden branches?
I never read anything concerning my work. I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is not directed to him, does not have to open and read.
My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing.
I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life...
So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in.
Those doves below, the ones utterly cared for, never endangered ones, cannot know tenderness.
Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner – what is it? if not the intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.
Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.