Salzburg, Austria - 20071. “Again and again, however we know the landscape of love / and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names, / and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others / fall: again and again the two of us walk out together / under the ancient trees, lie down again and again / among the flowers, face to face with the sky.”
2. “A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude. Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky.”
3. “Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines, For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open windows and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.“
4. "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."
5. “All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.”
6. "And we: spectators, always, everywhere, looking at everything, and never from!...Who's turned us around like this, so that whatever we do, we always have the look of someone going away? Just as a man on the last hill showing him his whole valley one last time, turns, and stops, and lingers -so we live, and are forever leaving.”
7. ”And you wait, keep waiting for that one thing
which would infinitely enrich your life:
the powerful, uniquely uncommon,
the awakening of dormant stones,
depths that would reveal you to yourself.
In the dusk you notice the book shelves
with their volumes in gold and in brown;
and you think of far lands you journeyed,
of pictures and of shimmering gowns
worn by women you conquered and lost.
And it comes to you all of a sudden:
That was it! And you arise, for you are
aware of a year in your distant past
with its fears and events and prayers.”
8. "..artistic experience lies so incredibly close to that of sex, to its pain and its ecstasy, that the two manifestations are indeed but different forms of one and the same yearning and delight."
9. “As Nature gives the other creatures over
to the venture of their dim delight
and in soil and branchwork grants none special cover,
so too our being's pristine ground settles our plight;
we are no dearer to it; it ventures us.
Except that we, more eager than plant or beast,
go with this venture, will it, adventurous
more sometimes than Life itself is, more daring
by a breath (and not in the least
from selfishness) . . . . There, outside all caring,
this creates for us a safety just there,
where the pure forces' gravity rules; in the end,
it is our unshieldedness on which we depend,
and that, when we saw it threaten, we turned it
so into the Open that, in widest orbit somewhere,
where the Law touches us, we may affirm it. “
10. “At the bottom no one in life can help anyone else in life; this one experiences over and over in every conflict and every perplexity: that one is alone. That isn't as bad as it may first appear; and again it is the best thing in life that each should have everything in himself; his fate, his future, his whole expanse and world.”
11. “Beauty's nothing but beginning of Terror we're still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Each single angel is terrible.”
12. “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to
love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books
that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the
answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be
able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the
questions now. Perhaps you will find them gradually, without
noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer.”
13. “But, alongside the most rapid movements, there will always be slow ones, such, indeed, as are of so extreme a leisureliness that we shall not live to see the course they take. But that is what humanity is for, is it not, to await the realization of that which exceeds a single life-span? From its point of view the slowest process is often the quickest, that is to say, we find that we called it slow simply because it could not be measured.“
14. “But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. / But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode. / We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. 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 abuses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always 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. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; 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.”
15. "But now that so much is changing, is it not up to us to change ourselves? Could we not develop ourselves a little, and slowly take upon ourselves our share of work in love, little by little?"
16. ”Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed, and growing sweet--
all this universe, to the furthest stars
all beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.
Now you feel how nothing clings to you;
your vast shell reaches into endless space,
and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.
Illuminated in your infinite peace,
a billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead.”
17. “Death is the side of life averted from us, unshone upon by us: we must try to achieve the greatest consciousness of our existence which is at home in both unbounded realms, inexhaustibly nourished from both . . . The true figure of life extends through both spheres, the blood of the mightiest circulation flowers through both: there is neither a here nor a beyond, but the great unity in which the beings that surpass us, the "angels," are at home. . . . We of the here and now are not for a moment hedged in the time-world, nor confined within it; we are incessantly flowing over and over to those who preceded us, to our origins and to those who seemingly come after us. In that greatest "open" world all are, one cannot say "simultaneous," for the very falling away of time determines that the all are. Transiency everywhere plunges into a deep being. And so all the configurations of the here and now are to be used not in a time-bound way only, but, as far as we are able, to be placed in those superior significances in which we have a share. But not in the Christian sense (from which I am more and more passionately moving away), but in a purely earthly, deeply earthly, blissfully earthy consciousness, we must introduce what is here seen and touched into the wider, into the widest orbit. Not into a beyond whose shadow darkens the earth, but into a whole, into the whole. Nature, the things of our intercourse and use, are provisional and perishable; but they are, as long as we are here, our property and our friendship, co-knowers of our distress and gladness, as they have already been the familiars of our forebears. So it is important not only not to run down and degrade all that is here, but just because of its provisionalness, which it shares with us, these phenomena and things should be understood and transformed by us in a most fervent sense. Transformed? Yes, for it is our task to imprint this provisional, perishable earth so deeply, so patiently and passionately in ourselves that its reality shall arise in us again "invisibly." We are the bees of the invisible. Nous butinons eperdument le miel du visible, pour l'accumuler dans la grande ruche d'or de l'Invisble. The Elegies show us at this work, at the work of these continual conversions of the beloved visible and tangible into the invisible vibrations and excitation of our own nature, which introduces new vibration-frequencies into the vibration-spheres of the universe. . . . The earth has no way out other than to become invisible: in us who with a part of our natures partake of the invisible, have (at least) stock in it, and can increase our holdings in the invisible during our sojourn here, in us alone can be consummated this intimate and lasting conversion.“
18. "Do continue to believe that with your feeling 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."
19. "Don’t be confused by surfaces; in the depths everything becomes law. What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. Walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours--that is what you must be able to attain."
20. "Don't forget that I belong to solitude, that I must not need anyone, that all my strength is born from this detachment."
21. “Do not assume that she who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. Her life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, she would never have been able to find these words."
22. "Do you remember still the falling stars
that like swift horses through the heavens raced
and suddenly leaped across the hurdles
of our wishes--do you recall? And we
did make so many! For there were countless numbers
of stars: each time we looked above we were
astounded by the swiftness of their daring play,
while in our hearts we felt safe and secure
watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate,
knowing somehow we had survived their fall."
23. “Encircled by her arms as by a shell,
she hears her being murmur,
while forever he endures
the outrage of his too pure image...
Wistfully following their example,
nature re-enters herself;
contemplating its own sap, the flower
becomes too soft, and the boulder hardens...
It's the return of all desire that enters
toward all life embracing itself from afar...
Where does it fall? Under the dwindling
surface, does it hope to renew a center?”
24. ”Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.”
25. "Explore transformation throughout. What is your most suffering experience? Is drinking bitter to you, turn to wine."
26. “Extensive as the "external" world is, with all its sidereal distances it hardly bears comparison with the dimensions, the depth dimensions, of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the universe to be, in itself, almost unlimited. It seems to me more and more as though our ordinary consciousness inhabits the apex of a pyramid whose base in us (and, as it were, beneath us) broadens out to such an extent that the further we are able to let ourselves down into it, the more completely do we appear to be included in the realities of earthly and, in the widest sense, worldy, existence, which are not dependent on time and space. From my earliest youth I have felt the intuition that at some deeper cross-section of this pyramid of consciousness, mere being could become an event, the inviolable presence and simultaneity of everything that we, on the upper, "normal," apex of self-consciousness, are permitted to experience only as entropy.”
27. ”Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”
28. “For one human being to love another human being, that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation .... Love does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person ... rather it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for another's sake ... :We are only just now beginning to consider the relation of one individual to a second individual objectively and without prejudice, and our attempts to live such relationships have no model before them. And yet in the changes brought about by time there are already many things that can help our timid novitiate.
The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing become imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous) disguises just so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the deforming influences of the other sex .... This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be surprised and struck by it. Someday ... there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the opposite of the male, but something in itself, something which makes one think not of any com-
plement and limit, but only of life and reality: the female human being.
This advance will (at first against the will of the outdistanced men) transform the love experience, which is now filed with error, and will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relation of one human being to another, no longer of man to woman. And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this - that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.”
29. "For one who is not pure has many enemies everywhere and is not safe from them. Only a pure being walks right through his enemy, shaking him to the core."
30. "For therein, too, lies my power, that I do not impede the most secret powers within me."
31. "Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves ... 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 it, 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."
32. "Having promised one another distance, hunting, and home, don't lovers always cross eachothers boundaries?"
33. ”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?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.
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.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.”
34. ”How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; 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.”
35. "...human relationships, which are an extract of life, are the most changeable of all, rising and falling, from minute to minute, and lovers are those whose relationships and contact no one moment resembles another."
36. ”I am, O Anxious One. Don't you hear my voice
surging forth with all my earthly feelings?
They yearn so high, that they have sprouted wings
and whitely fly in circles round your face.
My soul, dressed in silence, rises up
and stands alone before you: can't you see?
don't you know that my prayer is growing ripe
upon your vision as upon a tree?
If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.
But when you want to wake, I am your wish,
and I grow strong with all magnificence
and turn myself into a star's vast silence
above the strange and distant city, Time.”
37. "I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything penetrates more deeply into me and does not stop at the place where until now it always used to finish. I have an inner self of which I was ignorant. Everything goes thither now, what happens there I do not know."
38. “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 into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing. For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there any more, is already in our blood. And we do not learn what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house changes into which a guest has entered. We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens. And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside. The more still, more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does the new go into us, so much the better do we make it ours, so much the more will it be our destiny, and when on some later day it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to others), we shall feel in our inmost selves akin and near to it. And that is necessary. It is necessary and toward this our development will move gradually that nothing strange should befall us, but only that which has long belonged to us. We have already had to think so many of our concepts of motion, we will also gradually learn to realize that that which we call destiny goes forth from within people, not from without into them. Only because so many have not absorbed their destinies and transmuted them within themselves while they were living in them, have they not recognized what has gone forth out of them; it was so strange to them that, in their bewildered fright, they thought it must only just then have entered into them, for they swear never before to have found anything like it in themselves. As people were long mistaken about the motion of the sun, so they are even yet mistaken about the motion of that which is to come. The future stands firm . . . but we move in infinite space. How should it not be difficult for us? ”
39. "I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth."
40. "Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious
of his insights: without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition. Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will find them transformed like the beautiful gold in the fairy tale hich cannot remain gold because some small detail was not taken care of."
41. "I feel it now: there's a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world I
know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming
has need me…”
42. "I feel that to work is to live without dying. I am full of gratitude and joy. For since my earliest youth I have wanted nothing but that."
43. "If I were to tell you where my greatest feeling, my universal feeling, the bliss of my earthly existence has been, I would have to confess: It has always, here and there, been in this kind of in-seeing, in the indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments of this divine seeing into the heart of things."
44. “If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.”
45. "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."
46. ”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.”
47. "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. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation."
48. "...in life there is an immanent justice that fulfills itself slowly but without fail."
49. “In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious power.
And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.”
50. "I wanted to say two further things to you today: irony: Do not let yourself be governed by it, especially not in unproductive moments. In productive ones try to make use of it as one more means of seizing life."
51. "Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names,
so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their
connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all
directions, and find no place where they can settle."
52. "...let happy memories sustain you if your strength fails you, they are always there, and their current does not run backwards, even across foggy country it floats toward the future."
53. "Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always."
54. "Life is very singularly made to suprise us (where it does not utterly appall us)."
55. "Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life, they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure were more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work."
56. “Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.”
57. "Look, we don't love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms."
58. "Love and death are the two great gifts that we pass on, and we usually pass them on unopened"
59. "Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other."
60. "Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate-?); it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself in another's sake."
61. "Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in the hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away."
62. "May I be granted that, in your hands, the habit of looking on love as a thing to accomplish will leave, like an old pain- and that, slowly raising my eyes to look at you, I would no longer know where it had hurt- or where it had been."
63. “Not into a beyond whose shadow darkens the earth, but into a whole, into the whole.”
64. "Oh purity: Is it still possible? Is it possible still to be pure again? Is there a spring that would not be polluted by washing away one's shamefulness? Can such stained water still show itself in nature, which knows waste and ordure, but no evil, nothing opposed to herself, for she encompasses even what is most alien within her."
65. “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.”
66. “Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.”
67. “O, the world's soul will never be united
with mine, till what appears outside me,
as though it always meant to be inside me,
delightedly alights in me.”
68. "Painting is something that takes place among the colors, and one has to leave them alone completely, so that they can settle the matter among themselves. Their intercourse: this is the whole of painting. Whoever meddles, arranges, injects his human deliberation, his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already disturbing and clouding their activity."
69. ”Perhaps it's no more than the fire's reflection / on some piece of gleaming furniture / that the child remembers so much later / like a revelation.”
70. "Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And not our acceptance of it is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as a distraction instead of rallying toward exalted moments."
71. “Put out my eyes, and I can see you still,
Slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet;
And without any feet can go to you;
And tongueless, I can conjure you at will.
Break off my arms, I shall take hold of you
And grasp you with my heart as with a hand;
Arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true;
And if you set this brain of mine afire,
Then on my blood-stream I yet will carry you.”
72. "Self-transformation is precisely what life is..."
73. "Sex is difficult; yes. But they are difficult things with which we have been charged; almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious. 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 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."
74. ”She looked at him intensely, her eyes bigger and more radiant than ever before. He saw himself in them, in a strange way, and proudly back up, as if in front of a mirror.”
75. "Somehow I too must find a way of making things ; not plastic, written things, but realities that arise from the craft itself. Somehow I too must discover the smallest constituent element, the cell of my art, the tangible immaterial means of expressing everything."
76. "So whoever loves must try to act as if he had a great work: he must be much alone and go into himself and collect himself and hold fast to himself; he must work; he must become something!"
77. "Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems."
78. "Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity."
79. “[The artist is like] a dancer whose movements are broken by the constraint of his cell. That which finds no expression in his steps and limited swing of his arms, comes in exhaustion from his lips, or else he has to scratch the unlived lines of his body into the walls with his wounded fingers.“
80. ”The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
That I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
in the ponds broken off from the sky
my falling sinks, as if standing on fishes.”
81. "The demands which the difficult work of love makes upon our development are more than life-size, and as beginners we are not up to them."
82. "The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings."
83. “The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there's a power in me
to grasp and give shape to my world.
I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.”
“The necessary thing is great, inner solitude. / What goes on inwardly is worthy of your love.”
84. "The only journey is the one within."
85. “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
86. "There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force it's sap and stands confident in the storms of Spring without the fear that after them may come no Summer. It does come. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful."
87. ”There is no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient.”
88. “The terrible untruthfulness and uncertainty of our age has its roots in the refusal to acknowledge the happiness of sex, in this peculiarly mistaken guilt, which constantly increases, separating us from the rest of nature, even from the child, although his, the child's, innocence does not consist at all in the fact that he does not know sex, so to say, but that incomprehensible happiness, which awakens for us at one place deep within the pulp of a close embrace, is still present anonymously in every part of his body. In order to describe the peculiar situation of our sensual appetite we should have to say: Once we were children in every part, now we are that in one part only.”
89. "These are the days of turning toward the innerself, of increasingly taking possession of oneself, which, under apparent repose, goes on in the most intimate workings of the heart."
90. "The woman who loves always transcends the man she loves, because life is greater than fate. Her devotion wants to be immeasurable; that is her happiness."
91. “They (mankind) fall over themselves in their eagerness to make this world, which we should trust and delight in, evil and worthless and so they deliver the earth more and more into the hands of those who are prepared to wring at least a quick profit out of it. . . . The increasing exploitation of life today, is it not due to a continuous disparagement of this world, begun centuries ago? What madness to divert our thoughts to a beyond, when we are surrounded here by tasks and expectations and futures! What a swindle to steal pictures of earthly bliss in order to sell them to heaven behind our backs! Oh, it is high time that the impoverished earth got back all those loans from its happiness with which men have endowed the hereafter. . . . And, there being no such thing as a vacuum, is not the place of everything removed from here taken by a counterfeit is that why our cities are so full of ugly artificial light and noise, because we have surrendered the true brightness and song to a Jerusalem which we hope to move into presently? “
92. "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."
93. “...to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open windows and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return.”
94. "To speak of love is to speak of hardness."
95. "Turn therefore from the common themes to those which your everyday life affords; depict your sorrows and desires, your passing thoughts and belief in some kind of beauty -depict all that with heartfelt, quiet, humble sincerity and use to express yourself the things that surround you."
96. “We are the driving ones.
Ah, but the step of time:
think of it as a dream
in what forever remains.
All that is hurrying
soon will be over with;
only what lasts can bring
us to the truth.
Young men, don't put your trust
into the trials of flight,
into the hot and quick.
All things already rest:
darkness and morning light,
flower and book.”
97. "We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. 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. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called "visions," the whole so-called "spirit-world," death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God. But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. 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 abuses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always 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. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; 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."
98. "Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divination, perhaps we would then endure our sorrows with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent."
99. ”We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen.”
100. “When he sat, waiting abroad; the inn's
diffuse, averted room
morosely around him, and in the avoided mirror
again the room
and later from his tormenting bed
again:
debate was held in the air,
debate impalpable
upon his sensible heart, through the painfully shattered body,
his nonetheless sensible heart,
debate and the judgment:
that it did not have love
(and forbade him further ordainment).”
101. "When one speaks of solitaries, one always takes too much for granted, one supposes that people know what one is talking about. No, they do not. They have never seen a solitary, they have simply hated him without knowing him."
102. ”Where is the outwardness
to what lies here, within?
Whose wound was ever dressed,
bandaged in such fine linen?
Reflected here, what skies
lie open and at ease
as in a lake within
these open roses
in which all softly rests
as if no accidental hand
could shake or make it spill?
Unable to contain
the riches that are theirs
they pour out the excess
sharing their inwardness
to enrich the days; until
the whole of summer seems
one great room, a room within a dream.”
103. “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
And even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
Which we are just able to endure,
And we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.”
104. “Why are we not set in the midst of what is most mysteriously ours? How we have to creep round about it and get into it in the end; like burglars and thieves we get into our own beautiful sex, in which we lose our way and knock ourselves and stumble and finally rush out of it again, like men caught transgressing, into the twilight of Christianity. Why, if guilt or sin had to be invented because of the inner tension of the spirit, why did they not attach it to some other part of our body, why did it fall on that part, waiting till it dissolved in our pure source and poisoned and muddied it? Why have they made our sex homeless, instead of making it the place for the festival of our competency . . . ?”
105. “You, you only, exist.
We pass away, till at last,
our passing is so immense
that you arise: beautiful moment,
in all your suddenness,
arising in love, or enchanted
in the contraction of work.
To you I belong, however time may
wear me away. From you to you
I go commanded. In between
the garland is hanging in chance; but if you
take it up and up and up: look:
all becomes festival!”
106. "You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born... Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens...just wait for the birth, for the hour of new clarity.”
107. You, you only, exist. / *We* pass away, till at last, / our passing is so immense / that you arise: beautiful moment, / in all your suddenness, / arising in love, or enchanted / in the contraction of work. // To you I belong, however time may / wear me away. From you to you I go commanded. In between / the garland is hanging in chance; but if you / take it up and up and up: look: / all becomes festival!
