Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
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.
For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.
That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.
I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.
She who reconciles the ill-matched threadsOf her life, and weaves them gratefullyInto a single cloth – It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hallAnd clears it for a different celebration.
There are no classes in life for beginners: right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terrorwhich we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,because it serenely disdains to destroy us.Every angel is terrible.
In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?
Why don’t you think of [God] as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity… the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are.
It was not in me It came and wentI wanted to hold it It was held by wine(I no longer know what it was)
Look: the trees exist; the houseswe dwell in stand there stalwartly. Only wepass by it all, like a rush of air.And everything conspires to keep quiet about us,half out of shame perhaps, half out of some secret hope.
It wasn’t his, it wasn’t my fault,we both had nothing except patience,but Death has none. I saw him come (how meanly!)and I watched him as he took and took:none of it I could claim as mine.
And when suddenlythe god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry,uttered the words: ‘He has turned round’ –she comprehended nothing and said softly: ‘Who?
Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other.
The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
If we surrenderedto earth’s intelligencewe could rise up rooted, like trees.
I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.
A billion stars go spinning through the night,glittering above your head,But in you is the presence that will bewhen all the stars are dead.
Someday you will name me, then gently place those burning holy roses in my hair.[Songs of Longing]
Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.
O Stunden in der Kindheit,da hinter den Figuren mehr als nurVergangnes war und vor uns nicht die Zukunft.
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 winterthat only by wintering through it will your heart survive.
we want it visible to showwhen even the most visible joy will reveal itselfonly when we have transformed it within.there’s nowhere, my love, the world can existexpect within.
I live my life in growing orbits which move out over the things of the world.
I want to unfold.I don’t want to be folded anywhere,because where I am folded,there I am a lie.
only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.
Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.
There are a large number of people in the room, but one is unaware of them. They are in the books. At times they move among the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.
For sometime now I have believed that it is our own force, all our own force that is still too great for us. It is true that we do not know it; but is it not just that which is most our own of which we know the least?
I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.
Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.
Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame… at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.
Oh hours of childhood,when behind each shape more than the past appearedand what streamed out before us was not the f
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.
Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.
If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.
Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confidence in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer.
Who has not sat before his own heart’s curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.
And the heart has become so tired, and the longing so vast.
His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
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
Joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness.
May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.
Isn’t it time that, loving, we freed ourselves from the beloved, and, trembling, endured:as the arrow endures the bow, so as to be, in its flight, something more than itself?
Isn’t it time that, in love, we freed ourselves from the loved one and, trembling, endured:as the arrow endures the string, collecting itselfto be more than itself as it shoots?
Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor futurelessens . . . . Superabundant existencewells in my heart.
Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Angels often do now know whether they walk among the dead or living.
Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakable tender hand, placed beside another thread and held and carried by a hundred others.
The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.
Now I come to you full of future. And from habit we begin to live our past.
No waiting the beyond, no peering toward it,but longing to degrade not even death;we shall learn earthliness, and serve its ends,to feel its hands about us like a friend’s.
That is fundamentally the only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things that can befall us
perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys
It seems to him there area thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.
Now we wake up with our memoryand fix our gazes on that which was;whispering sweetness, which once coursed through us,sits silently beside us with loosened hair
Perhaps all the dragons of your life are princesses, who are only waiting for us to show a little beauty and courage. Perhaps at the very bottom every horror is something helpless, that wants help from us
Let your judgements have their own quiet, undisturbed development, which must, like all progress, come from deep within, and cannot in any way be pressed or hurried.
I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it.
Long you must suffer, knowing not what,until suddenly out of spitefully chewed fruit your suffering’s taste comes forth in you.Then you will love almost instantly what’s tasted. No one will ever talk you out of it.
Have patience with everything unresolved in you heart and try to love the questions themselves. It is possible to live and not know.
Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.
Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love.
I love the dark hours of my being.My mind deepens into them.There I can find, as in old letters,the days of my life, already lived,and held like a legend, and understood.
most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.
Whoever you are, go out into the evening,leaving your room, of which you know every bit;your house is the last before the infinite,whoever you are.
For even the best err in words when they are meant to mean most delicate and almost inexpressible things.
weren’t you alwaysdistracted by expectation, as if every eventannounced a beloved? (Where can you find a placeto keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside yougoing and coming and often staying all night.)…
No, my life is not this precipitous hourthrough which you see me passing at a run.
Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power / formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth.
Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander on the boulevards, up and down, restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing.
What an unilateral life, when from the material of a renunciation, we must fashion something we love.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,just once. And never again. But to have beenthis once, completely, even if only once:to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it becomes clear that most people get to know only one corner of their room, a window seat, a strip of floor which they pace up and down.
Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way–and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.
It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.
Earth, my dearest, oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over…Unspeakably, I have belonged to you, from the flush.
But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.
And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.
Never forget that solitude is my lot … I implore those who love me to love my soli
We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.
I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.
At first the solitudecharmed me like a prelude,but so much music wounded me.
Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Then suddenly you’re left all alonewith your body that can’t love youand your will that can’t save you.
Those doves below, the ones utterly cared for, never endangered ones, cannot know tenderness.
The free animalhas its dying always behind itand God in front of it, and its wayis the eternal way, as the spring flowing.Never, not for a moment, do we havepure space before us, where the flowersendlessly open.
It is necessary – and toward this point our development will move, little by little – that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own.
If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing then you are a writer””Se alla mattina quando ti alzi non pensi altro che allo scrivere allora sei uno scrittore
When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.
Everything that has been wrestled from doubtI welcome-the mouths that burst open afterlong knowledge of what it is to be mute.
Death is our friend, precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.
Girls, there are poets who learn from youto say, what you, in your aloneness, are;and they learn through you to live distantness,as the evenings through the great starsbecome accustomed to eternity.
Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice.
Seulement la terre qui obéit,sait bien qu’elle tourne en rond,tandis que nous vers l’infininous précipitons.Translation:But the obedient Earth well knowsthat she moves round and round,whereas we hurtle downtoward infinity.
Don’t take my devils away, because my angels may flee too.
Read the lines as if they were unknown to you, and you will feel in your inmost self how very much they are yours.
If you think your world isn’t poetic enough, or exciting enough to tell a story about, that’s not because it’s a dull world, that’s because you’re not poet enough to wake its soul up.
How he loved and yetwished to leave you: always both, at once.
Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
In the room…they are inside the books. They move sometimes within the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams.
Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstanding that can gather around a new name.
Fame is nothing but the sum of all the misunderstandings that cluster around a new name…Wherever a human achievement becomes truly great, it seeks to hide its face in the lap of general, nameless greatness.
I believe that that love remains strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life.
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. …live in the question.
I live my life in growing orbits which move out over this wondrous world, I am circling around God, around ancient towers and i have been circling for a thousand years. And I still dont know if I am an eagle or a storm or a great song.
For we, when we feel, evaporate: oh, webreathe ourselves out and away: from ember to ember,yielding us fainter fragrance.
Praise, my dear one.Let us disappear into praising.Nothing belongs to us.
We only pass everything by like a transposition of air.
If your daily life seems poor do not blame it blame yourself tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.
Our being is continually undergoing and entering upon changes. … We must strictly speaking at every moment give each other up and let each other go and not hold each other back.
Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are moments when something new has entered into us something unknown.
Fame is the sum of the misunderstanding that gathers about a new name.
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 into all things.
Do continue to believe that with your feeling and your work you are taking part in the greatest the more strongly you cultivate in yourself this belief the more will reality and the world go forth from it.
Nothing in this world can one imagine beforehand not the least thing. Everything is made up of so many unique particulars that cannot be foreseen.
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks the ultimate the last test and proof the work for which all other work is but preparation.
This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love the more they give the more they possess.
Love consists in this that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
Oh longing for places that were not Cherished enough in that fleeting hour How I long to make good from afar The forgotten gesture the additional act.
Everyone once once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again.
Wanting to change to improve a person’s situation means offering him for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered.
Who’s not sat tense before his own heart’s curtain?
Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest the more strongly you cultivate this belief the more will reality and the world go forth from it.
If your daily life seems poor do not blame it blame yourself tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.
One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.
Success which is something so simple in the end is made up of thousands of things we never fully know what.
Nothing in the world can one imagine beforehand not the least thing. Everything is made up of so many unique particulars that cannot be foreseen.
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.
One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.
Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
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.
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.
The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.