“Many things are too delicate to be thought; many more, to be spoken.”

A character is a completely fashioned will.

Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.

The mysterious path goes inward. It is in us, and not anywhere else, where the eternity of the worlds, the past and the future are found.

Man is lyrical, woman epic, marriage dramatic.

Christianity is the root of all democracy, the highest fact in the rights of men.

Perceptibility is a kind of attentiveness.

The history of every individual man should be a Bible.

To become properly acquainted with a truth, we must first have disbelieved it, and disputed against it.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

All power appears only in transition. Permanent power is stuff.

Life is the beginning of death. Life is for the sake of death. Death is at once the end and the beginning—at once separation and closer union of the self. Through death the reduction is complete.

I often feel, and ever more deeply I realize, that fate and character are the same conception.

Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.

Only as far as a man is happily married to himself is he fit for married life and family life in general.

One should, when overwhelmed by the shadow of a giant, move aside and see if the colossal shadow isn’t merely that of a pygmy blocking out the sun.

Man has his being in truth–if he sacrifices truth he sacrifices himself. Whoever betrays truth betrays himself. It is not a question of lying–but of acting against one’s conviction.

The bird building her home on your windowsill has every nest destroyed before. The spider that is delicately weaving a masterpiece has had every single thread broken before. And despite it all, they try again.

An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

An honorable human relationship … is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

She leads us through their unknown world, her gift of language rising up like a delicate string of necessary lights.

To joke in the face of danger is the supreme politeness, a delicate refusal to cast oneself as a tragic hero.

Now, a living organism is nothing but a wonderful machine endowed with the most marvellous properties and set going by means of the most complex and delicate mechanism.

When a dream is born in you With a sudden clamorous pain, When you know the dream is true And lovely, with no flaw nor stain, O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch You’ll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.

Be gentle, always delicate with every soul you meet, for every single morning you wake up, there is someone Wishing, silently and secretly, that they had not.