“Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell.”

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening.

You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation…and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.

It taught him how to listen — how to listen with a quiet heart and a waiting soul, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgment, without opinion.

The true profession of a man is to find his way to himself.

Happiness is a how; not a what. A talent, not an object.

A magic dwells in each beginning, protecting us, telling us how to live.

Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long.

No permanence is ours, we are a wave that flows to fit whatever form it finds.

I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.

A house without books is a poor house, even if beautiful rugs are covering its floors and precious wallpapers and pictures cover its walls

There is no reality except the one contained within us.

I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.

Solitude is independence.

When you like someone, you like them in spite of their faults. When you love someone, you love them with their faults.

Your soul is the whole world.

Age is a state of mind. Youth and age exist only among the ordinary people. All the more talented and exceptional of us; are sometimes old, just as we are sometimes happy, and sometimes sad.

The oak tree: not interested in cherry blossoms.

But pleasures are like poppies spread, You seize the flower, it’s bloom is shed; Or, like the snow-fall in the river, A moment white, then melts forever.

Beautiful flower, grow untamed.

I think you’re made of flowers, how you bloom when there’s light in your skin.

All sorts of flowers the which on earth do spring In goodly colours gloriously arrayed; Go to my love, where she is careless laid.

How many perils doe enfold The righteous man to make him daily fall.

As one sits here in summertime and listens to the cuckoo and all the other bird songs, the crackling and buzzing of insects, as one gazes at the shining colors of flowers, doth one become dumbstruck before the Kingdom of the Creator.

I knew I held strength when in the darkest, coldest corner of my mind I managed to make flowers grow.