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Life is difficult…

• What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.
• There are no classes in life for beginners: right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.
• People have tended (with the help of conventions) to resolve everything in the directions of easiness, of the light, and on the lightest side of light, but it is clear that we must hold to the heavy; the difficult.
• Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand always already quite near its transformation.
• Who speaks of conquering? To endure is everything.
• This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us.
• Life is heavier than the weight of all things.
• Those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious.

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…but life and its struggles are deeply worthwhile

• To be here is immense.
• The point is to live everything.
• It is clear that we must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance.
• The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
• Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.
• One moment your life is a stone in you, and the next moment a star!
• Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.
• What batters you becomes your strength.
• It is true that these mysteries are dreadful, and people have always drawn away from them. But where can we find anything sweet and glorious that would never wear this mask, the mask of the dreadful? Whoever does not, sometimes or other, give his full consent, his full and joyous consent to the dreadfulness of life, can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence; can only walk on its edge, and one day, when the judgment is given, will have been neither alive nor dead.
• 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.
• Bound by conventions, people tend to reach for what is easy. Here we must be unafraid of what is difficult. For all living beings in nature must unfold in their particular way and become themselves despite all opposition.
• He who does not at some time, with definite determination consent to the terribleness of life, or even exalt in it, never takes possession of the inexpressible fullness of the power of our existence.
• In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.
• Nearly everything that matters is a challenge, and everything matters.

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The difficult struggle exists to be embraced

• We must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance.
• Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? 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 and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.
• When something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand already quite near its transformation.
• Right in the difficult we must have our joy, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.
• This is what things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.
• May you find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith.
• If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.
• When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.
• Most people have turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it.
• 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.

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Surrender to life

• Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
• 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.
• Let everything happen to you
  Beauty and terror
  Just keep going
  No feeling is final.
• You must realise that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that is holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.
• Don’t observe yourself too closely. Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen.
• Trees do not force their sap, nor does the flower push its bloom.
• The flower bends when the wind wants it to, and you must become like that-that is, filled with deep trust.
• All things want to float.

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Trust in life

• We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them…. Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

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Life is a tapestry

• Success, which is something so simple in the end, is made up of thousands of things, we never fully know what.
• No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others.
• We make our way through everything like a thread passing through fabric, giving shape to images, that we ourselves do not know.
• 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.
• She who reconciles the ill-matched threads Of her life, and weaves them gratefully Into a single cloth – It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall And clears it for a different celebration.

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Dreams are glimpses into the future

• I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.
• Wishes are recollections coming from the future.
• The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.
• As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still, it is we who move in infinite space.

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The power of solitude

• A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude
• 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.
• But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is-solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.
• 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.
• Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant.
• I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each shall stand guard over the solitude of the other.
• I implore those who love me to love my solitude.
• I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
• It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
• Let your beauty manifest itself without talking and calculation. You are silent. It says for you: I am. And comes in meaning thousandfold, come at long last over everyone.
• Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
• Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
• Solitude is nothing that one can choose or retrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.
• The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person solitude.
• The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one – this one must be able to attain.
• The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust.
• Understand, I’ll slip away from the noisy crowd when I see the pale stars rising, blooming, over the oaks. I’ll pursue solitary pathways through the pale twilit meadows, with only this one dream: You come too.
• What is necessary, after all, is only thing: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours—that is what you must be able to attain.
• What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours-that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child.
• What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude.
• Your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance.
• I am too alone in the world and not alone enough to make every moment holy.
• I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.

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The journey within

• The only journey is the one within.
• There is only one journey. Going inside yourself.
• I know of no other advice than this: Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth.
• Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.
• I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth.
• What happens most deeply inside you is worthy of your whole love.
• You are not too old and it is not too late to dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out its own secret.
• The deep parts of my life pour onward, as if the river shores were opening out. I feel closer to what language can’t reach. With my senses, as with birds, I climb into the windy heaven… in the ponds broken off from the sky.
• .. of the world you carry within you.
• Whoever now makes himself bigger, freer and more human in his own existence, is doing his part toward peace, — as yet it must be worked at in an inward direction, not until a few have it all big and ready within them can it let itself be brought into the world.
• Go into yourself. Dig into yourself for a deep answer.
• No one can advise and help you, no one. There is only one way: go within.

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Silence

• Since I’ve learned to be silent, everything has come so much closer to me.
• The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.
• Deeply I go down into myself. My god is Dark and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.
• Our task is to listen to the news that is always arriving out of silence.

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The power of love

• To love is also good, for love is hard. Love between one person and another: that is perhaps the hardest thing it is laid on us to do, the utmost, the ultimate trial and test, the work for which all other work is just preparation. For this reason, young people, who are beginners in everything, do not know how to love: they must learn.
• Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
• We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.
• I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
• Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
• This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.
• For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
• I want to love the things as no one has thought to love them.
• Everything terrible is something that needs our love.
• To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.
• And do not change. Do not divert your love from visible things. But go on loving what is good, simple and ordinary; animals and things and flowers, and keep the balance true.
• This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love; the more they give, the more they possess of that precious nourishing love from which flowers and children have their strength and which could help all human beings if they would take it without doubting.
• There is time only to work slowly There is no time not to love.
• Go on loving what is good, simple, and ordinary.
• It is part of the nature of every definitive love that sooner or later it can reach the beloved only in infinity.
• That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.

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Joy

• Joy is a marvellous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness.
• The most visible joy can only reveal itself to us when we’ve transformed it, within.

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Patience

• I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!
• May you find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith.

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Oneness

• Yet everything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin’s bow, which draws one voice out of two separate strings.
• I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.

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Helping others

• It seems to me that the only way one can be helpful is to extend one’s hand to someone else involuntarily, and without ever knowing how useful this will be.

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Allowing ourselves to unfold

• I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
• I would like to step out of my heart and go walking beneath the enormous sky.

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Darkness transforms

• Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
• 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.
• You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. … But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven’t rather gone right through you [that is, passed through you]. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.
• Perhaps we should then bear our sadness with greater assurance than our joys. For they are the moments when something new enters us, something unknown to us.
• You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world.

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Love the questions

• Be patient toward all that unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked room and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
• Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you’ve learned, but in the questions you’ve learned how to ask yourself.
• Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.

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Give each other space to be

• Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
• A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude.
• A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development.
• 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.

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Trust your innermost being

• What goes on in your innermost being is worth all your love, this is what you must work on however you can and not waste too much time and too much energy on clarifying your attitude to other people.
• …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 beginning to grow vast…. be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend.
• 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.
• As if no one had tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.

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Listen to the truth within

• Always trust yourself and your own feelings, as opposed to arguments and discussions. If it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights.

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Trust in nature and life

• If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowl
• If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.
• Timeless sea breezes, that for ages have blown ancient rocks, you are purest space coming from afar.
• When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm, upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused.
• You must think that something is happening upon you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.
• A birdsong can even, for a moment, make the whole world into a sky within us, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between its heart and the world’s.

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Blame

• 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.
• 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.

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Doubt

• 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 proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don’t give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers–perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.
• Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Do not despair if the answers don’t come immediately. Some answers are only revealed with the passage of time.
• Your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism.

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Sadness resisted

• It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.
• We wasters of sorrows! How we stare away into sad endurance beyond them, trying to foresee their end! Whereas they are nothing else than our winter foliage, our sombre evergreen, one of the seasons of our interior year.
• The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise.

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Fear

• Our deepest fears are like dragons, guarding our deepest treasure.
• One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.

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Art

• Art too is a just a way of living.
• No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.
• The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
• Works of Art are of an infinite loneliness.
• A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.
• Works of art are of infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.
• Works of art always spring from those who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go. The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes.
• 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.
• Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside.
• A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.
• To be an artist means not to compute or count.
• Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings.
• No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.
• The artist’s task consists of making one thing of many, and a world from the smallest part of a thing.
• More unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.
• The artist’s experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss.
• My art is representational by choice….if the art of painting is to survive, it must describe and express people, their lives and times. It must communicate.

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Creating

• May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.
• Where I create, there I am true.
• Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.
• 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.
• One of the most difficult tests for the creator: he must always remain unconscious, unaware of his best virtues, if he doesn’t want to rob them of their candor and innocence.
• In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive, filling it with sublimity and exaltation.
• Everything is gestation and then birthing.
• To work is to live without dying.

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Writing

• Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write.
• This above all — ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.
• If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing . . . then you are a writer.
• Girls, there are poets who learn from you to say, what you, in your aloneness are; and they learn through you to live distantness, as the evenings through the great stars become accustomed to eternity.
  He does not always remain bent over pages; he often leans back and closes his eyes over a line he has been reading again, and its meaning spreads through his blood.
• As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.
• Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer.

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Reading

• He does not always remain bent over the pages; he often leans back and closes his eyes over a line he has been reading again, and its meaning spreads through his blood.
• Of all my books, I find only a few indispensable.

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Sex and Equality

• Sex is difficult, yes. But they are difficult things with which we have been charged…If you only recognize this and manage out of yourself, out of your own nature and ways, out of your own experience and childhood and strength to achieve a relation to sex wholly your own (not influenced by convention and custom) then you need no longer be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your best possession.
• Some day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer signify merely an opposite of the masculine, but something in itself, something that makes one think, not of any complement and limit, but only of life and existence: the female human being.

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Death

• Death is the side of life which is turned away from us.
• God, gives us each our own death, the dying that proceeds from each of our lives.
• 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… Life always says Yes and No simultaneously. Death (I implore you to believe) is the true Yea-sayer. It stands before eternity and says only: Yes.
• Dying is strange and hard if it is not our death, but a depth that takes us by storm, when we’ve ripened none within us.
• Love and death are the greatest gifts that are given to us; mostly they are passed on unopened.
• 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.
• Is not impermanence the very fragrance of our days?
• The knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance.
• They, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time.
• I believe that nothing that is real can pass away.
• Life and death: they are one, at core entwined. Who understands himself from his own strain presses himself into a drop of wine and throws himself into the purest flame.

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The mystery of Being

• 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.
• Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.
• 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.
• The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.
• God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.
• Most experiences are unsayable; they come to fullness in a realm that words do not inhabit.
• Let your beauty manifest itself without talking and calculation.​ You are silent. It says for you: I am. And comes in meaning thousandfold​, comes at long last over everyone.
• 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.

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Religion

• Religion is something infinitely simple, ingenuous. It is not knowledge, not content of feeling… it is not duty and not renunciation, it is not restriction: but in the infinite extent of the universe it is a direction of the heart.

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God

• Why don’t you conceive of God as an ally who is coming, who has been approaching since time began, the one who will someday arrive, the fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? Why not project his birth into the future, and live your life as an excruciating and lyrical moment in the history of a prodigious pregnancy?
• God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.
• God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.

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Emotions

• All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.

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Final thoughts

• Our heart always transcends us.
• I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several. 
• 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.
• And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.
• Do not allow yourself to be misled by the surfaces of things
• I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false.
• Don’t take my devils away, because my angels may flee too.
• Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you.
• Again and again in history some people wake up. They have no ground in the crowd and move to broader deeper laws. They carry strange customs with them and demand room for bold and audacious action. The future speaks ruthlessly through them. They change the world.
• I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
• Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good.
• All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.
• Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
• Be, in this immensity of night, the magic force at your sense’s crossroad.
• There are moments in which a rose is more important than a piece of bread.
• Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive.
• Who has not sat before his own heart’s curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.
• As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build.
• So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.
• Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
• All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.
• For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences.
• At bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.
• We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it.
• Do not be bewildered by the surfaces: in the depths all becomes law.
• He who understands one thing understands everything, for the same laws are in all.
• But there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere.
• Across the moment, aeons speak with aeons. More than we experienced has gone by.
• My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing.
• What keeps you from… living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy?
• Never believe fate is more than the condensation of childhood.
• I am the rest between two notes which are somehow always in discord.
• That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.

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• Life – a sexually transmitted terminal condition
• Life + a cat … adds up to an incalculable sum.
• Love is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack.
• It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.
• .. sat down for a moment when the dog was finished in order to watch it… and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it could not have been made better.
• More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed.
• Fame is the sum of the misunderstanding that gathers about a new name.
• There may be good, but there are no pleasant marriages.

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