“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 purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue.

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks.

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.

Truly to sing, that is a different breath.

Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest.

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.

One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.

I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.

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.

It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.

Love is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack.

He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there’s another dog.

Any happiness, no matter how brief, seemed better than the long, simmering torture of waking up day after day, knowing i could never have him.

You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose…

Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.

Any one prominent in affairs can always see when a man may steal a horse and when a man may not look over a hedge.

One cannot demand of art that it pay you in any other way than in the satisfaction of the work itself.

I do not believe in any religion, I will have nothing to do with immortality. We are miserable enough in this life without speculating upon another.

That’s why this generation is the least racist generation ever. You see it all the time. Go to any club.

I have no idea where I want to go musically, but I’m fine that way. I don’t need to be faithful to any concept, you know.