If I were to command a general to turn into a seagull, and if the general did not obey, that would not be the general’s fault. It would be mine.
Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
But eyes are blind. You have to look with the heart.
You do not explain the tree by telling of the water it has drunk, the minerals it has absorbed, and the sunlight that strengthened it.
Attitude is a paintbrush. It colors everything!
It was the contemplation of God that created men who were equal, for it was in God that they were equal.
Surely a man needs a closed place wherein he may strike root and, like the seed, become. But also he needs the great Milky Way above him and the vast sea spaces, though neither stars nor ocean serve his daily needs.
One is a member of a country, a profession, a civilization, a religion. One is not just a man.
We are prudent people. We are afraid to let go of our petty reality in order to grasp at a great shadow.
Even our misfortunes are a part of our belongings.
I was wrong to grow older. Pity. I was so happy as a child.
To love is not to look at one another: it is to look, together, in the same direction.
True love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have.
I still fall for your everyday.
When I find a woman attractive, I have nothing at all to say. I simply watch her smile. Intellectuals take apart her face in order to explain it bit by bit, but they no longer see the smile.
A sky as pure as water bathed the stars and brought them out.
The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the starts.
The essential things in life are seen, not with the eyes but with the heart.
When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed. Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied. Only those relationships matter. The body is an old crock that nobody will miss. I have never known a man to think of himself when dying. Never.
All of us have had the experience of a sudden joy that came when nothing in the world had forewarned us of its coming – a joy so thrilling that if it was born of misery we remembered even the misery with tenderness.