Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

The light died in the low clouds. Falling snow drank in the dusk. Shrouded in silence, the branches wrapped me in their peace. When the boundaries were erased, once again the wonder: that *I* exist.

Everything will be all right – you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves.

It is not the repeated mistakes, the long succession of petty betrayals–though, God knows, they would give cause enough for anxiety and self-contempt–but the huge elementary mistake, the betrayal of that within me which is...

This accidentalmeeting of possibilitiescalls itself I.I ask: what am I doing here?And, at once, this Ibecomes unreal.

It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity.

If only I may grow: firmer, simpler, quieter, warmer.

Those who invoke history will certainly be heard by history. And they will have to accept its verdict.

He is one of those who has had the wilderness for a pillow, and called a star his brother. Alone. But loneliness can be a communion.

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.

Beneath the hush a whisper from long ago, promising peace of mind and a burden shared.No peace which is not peace for all, no rest until all has been fulfilled.

Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor...

If even dying is to be made a social function, then, grant me the favor of sneaking out on tiptoe without disturbing the party.

Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find the right road.

Time goes by, reputation increases, ability declines.

When the sense of the earth unites with the sense of one’s body, one becomes earth of the earth, a plant among plants, an animal born from the soil and fertilizing it. In this union,...

God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily,...

You wake from dreams of doom and–for a moment–you know: beyond all the noise and the gestures, the only real thing, love’s calm unwavering flame in the half-light of an early dawn.

At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose *your* self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I’s. But in one of them is there a...

In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.

When you have reached the point where you no longer expect a response, you will at last be able to give in such a way that the other is able to receive, and be grateful....

Constant attention by a good nurse may be just as important as a major operation by a surgeon.

The myths have always condemned those who ‘looked back.’ Condemned them, whatever the paradise may have been which they were leaving. Hence this shadow over each departure from your decision.

A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of the earth in its movements? No. Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen...

‘Freedom from fear’ could be said to sum up the whole philosophy of human rights.

It is not we who seek the Way, but the Way which seeks us. That is why you are faithful to it, even while you stand waiting, so long as you are prepared, and act...