“We are led on, like little children, by a way we know not.”

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.

Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.

Death is the king of this world: ‘Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

We are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering.

Those who trust us educate us.

It is as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog.

That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil — widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.

It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

The best travel is that which one can take by one’s own fireside. In memory or imagination.

In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past-sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say ‘I’; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.

Jesus Christ, Lord of all things! You see my heart, you know my desires.

He knows what he speaks of, what he brings with him and what he promises; and he can convey it to those who know it not.

I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.

One of the most powerful sayings I have come across is by Imam ash-Shafi’I, “My heart is at ease knowing that what was meant for me will never miss me, and that what misses me was never meant for me.”

I believe we are all part of the spiritual heart. We all come from that place of oneness, so that place in us that knows love, that knows connection, hurts.

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.

They only go after what they know they can get.