There are no classes in life for beginners: right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.

It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in...

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...

Wishes are memories coming from our future!

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.

The only journey is the one within.

For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breatheourselves out and away; with each new heartfirewe give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us:you’re in my blood, this room, Spring itselfis...

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...

How surely gravity’s law,strong as an ocean current,takes hold of the smallest thingand pulls it toward the heart of the world.Each thing—each stone, blossom, child—is held in place.Only we, in our arrogance,push out beyond what...

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...

Great sadnesses … they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no...

Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power / formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth.

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.

Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other.

Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.

Seele im RaumHier bin ich, hier bin ich, Entrungene,taumelnd.Wag ichs denn? Werf ich mich?Fähige waren schon vieldort, wo ich drängte. Nun woauch noch die Mindesten restlos Macht vollziehn,schweigend vor Meisterschaft —:Wag ichs denn ? Werf...

So it’s back once more, back up the slope.Why do they always ruin my ropewith their cuts?I felt so ready the other day,Had a real foretaste of eternityIn my guts.Spoonfeeding me yet another sipfrom life’s...

there is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the...

You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you – no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself....

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.

A billion stars go spinning through the night, / glittering above your head, / But in you is the presence that will be / when all the stars are dead.

Oh hours of childhood,when behind each shape more than the past appearedand what streamed out before us was not the future.We felt our bodies growing and were at times impatient to be grown up, half...

I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spend in the most profound activity. Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not...

Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own...

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...

This advance (at first very much against the will of the outdistanced men) will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into...

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?

we want it visibleto showwhen even the most visible joywill reveal itselfonly when we havetransformed it within.there’s nowhere, my love, the world can existexpect within.

And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to...

I believe that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered...

No, my life is not this precipitous hourthrough which you see me passing at a run.

Ist dir Trinken bitter, werde Wein.

Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go on seeing you.Seal my ears, I’ll go on hearing you.And without feet I can make my way to you,without a mouth I can swear your name.Break off my arms, I’ll...

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.

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

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing. Just...

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.

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.

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...