“On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net.”

The soul exceeds its circumstances.

Love means to look at yourself The way one looks at distant things For you are only one thing among many.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy, Repeats while he binds his tomatoes: No other end of the world will there be, No other end of the world will there be.

Irony is the glory of slaves.

The partition separating life from death is so tenuous. The unbelievable fragility of our organism suggests a vision on a screen: a kind of mist condenses itself into a human shape, lasts a moment and scatters.

The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.

Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.

It’s true that what is morbid is highly valued today, and so you may think that I am only joking or that I’ve devised just one more means of praising Art with the help of irony.

We have become indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

Be young forever, seasons of the earth.

Language is the only homeland.

Do you know how it is when one wakes at night suddenly and asks, listening to the pounding heart: what more do you want, insatiable?

All was taken away from you: white dresses, wings, even existence.

For a country without a past is nothing, a word That, hardly spoken, loses its meaning, A perishable wall destroyed by flame, An echo of animal emotions.

I’ve never before been so aware of the thousands of little good things, the thousands of things that go right every day.

If you love what you do and are willing to do what it takes, it’s within your reach.

A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.

Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.

Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

Building a wardrobe is like building a circle of friends your whole life…. Your own beauty is to be yourself, but of course we need tools and accessories.

In a narrow circle the mind grows narrow. The more one expands, the larger their aims.

In a narrow circle the mind contracts. Man grows with his expanded needs.