If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.

I am the rest between two notes which are somehow always in discord.

Everything terrible is something that needs our love.

How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.

Every angel is terrifying.

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.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.

If we surrendered to earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.

That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.

May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.

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.

You are not too old and it is not too late to dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out it's own secret

Think... of the world you carry within you.

This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.

If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow