The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.

Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.

You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. A village means that you are not alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the earth, there is something that belongs to you, waiting for you when you are not there.

To know the world, one must construct it

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.