If I were to command a general to turn into a seagull, and if the general did not obey, that would not be the general's fault. It would be mine.

What value has compassion that does not take its object in its arms?

Sometimes we behave as though there was something more important than life. But what?

It is the missed opportunity that counts, and in a love that vainly yearns from behind prison bars you have perchance the love supreme.

No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.

You do not explain the tree by telling of the water it has drunk, the minerals it has absorbed, and the sunlight that strengthened it.

What he had yearned to embrace was not the flesh but a down spirit, a spark, the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh.