I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to...

Isn’t it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string...

Sonnets To Orpheus, Part Two, XIIWant the change. Be inspired by the flamewhere everything shines as it disappears.The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so muchas the curve of the body as it turns away.What locks...

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.

We, hurt by ourselves, keento be hurters and keento be hurt back deep inside.We, like weapons laidbeside anger asleep.

Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

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.

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...

Our heart always transcends us.

so much is happening now; you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like someone who is recovering; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are also the doctor, who has...

They all have tired mouthsand bright seamless souls.And a longing (as for sin)sometimes haunts their dreams.They are almost all alike; in God’s gardens they keep still,like many, many intervalsin his might and melody.Only when they...

Things are not all so comprehensible and utterable as people would mostly have us believe; most events are unutterable, consummating themselves in a sphere where word has never trod, and more unutterable than them all...

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...

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

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...

Think… of the world which you carry within yourself… and set it above everything that you notice about you. Your inmost happening is worth your whole love, that is what you must somehow work at,...

You, yesterday’s boy,to whom confusion came:Listen, lest you forget who you are.It was not pleasure you fell into. It was joy.You were called to be bridegroom,though the bride coming toward you is your shame.What chose...

Never forget that solitude is my lot … I implore those who love me to love my solitude.”(Letter to Mimi Romanelli, May 11, 1910)

Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the...

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.

If we surrenderedto earth’s intelligencewe could rise up rooted, like trees.Instead we entangle ourselvesin knots of our own makingand struggle, lonely and confused.So like children, we begin again…to fall,patiently to trust our heaviness.Even a bird...

Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions...

Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the...

His gaze, bluntedby the unnumbered processionof iron bars, uncountedas his softly padded steps.Smooth motion of blood and sinewturning in its own, small circleprescribed by bars and walls…and skin, confined.Suddenly, without warning,a flash of light and...

Bisognerebbe saper attendere, raccogliere, per una vita intera e possibilmente lunga, senso e dolcezza, e poi, proprio alla fine, si potrebbero forse scrivere dieci righe valide. Perché i versi non sono, come crede la gente,...

You, God, who live next door–If at times, through the long night, I trouble youwith my urgent knocking–this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom.I know you’re all alone in that room. If you...

This is the creature there has never been.They never knew it, and yet, none the less,they loved the way it moved, its suppleness,its neck, its very gaze, mild and serene.Not there, because they loved it,...

Who has not sat before his own heart’s curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.

It seems to him there area thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.

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.

Those doves below, the ones utterly cared for, never endangered ones, cannot know tenderness.

Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away… and this shows that the space around you is...

You who never arrived in my arms, Beloved, who were lost from the start, I don’t even know what songs would please you. I have given up trying to recognize you in the surging wave...

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence. For beauty’s...

If we only arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our...

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.

it is clear that we must trust what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at...

And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand...

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of...

I want my own will, and I wantsimply to be with my will,as it goes toward action.And in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times,when something is coming near,I want to be with those who knowsecret...

But now that so much is changing, isn’t it time for us to change? Couldn’t we try to gradually develop and slowly take upon ourselves, little by little, our part in the great task of...

I would like to sing someone to sleep,to sit beside someone and be there.I would like to rock you and sing softlyand go with you to and from sleep.I would like to be the one...

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.

Again and again, however we know the landscape of loveand the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the othersfall: again and again the two of us walk out...

I live my life in widening circleThat reach out across the world. I may not ever complete the last one,But I give myself to it. I circle around God, that primordial tower.I have been circling...

Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walkonly on feelings. That faces upwardand in its mirrorreceives heavenly roads, which travelalong themselves.That has learned to walk upon waterwhen it scoops,that walks upon wells,transfiguring every...

Odd, the words: ‘while away the time’.How to hold it fast the harder thing.Who is not fearful: where is there a staying,where in all this is there any being?Look, as the day slows towards the...

Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones...

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.