The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread.

Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth.

When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego ... things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.

I have a very great fear of love. It is so personal. Let each bird fly with its own wings, and each fish swim its own course.--Morning brings more than love. And I want to be true to the morning.

Now man cannot live without some vision of himself. But still less can he live with a vision that is not true to his inner experience and inner feeling.

To our senses, the elements are four and have ever been, and will ever be for they are the elements of life, of poetry, and of perception, the four Great Ones, the Four Roots, the First Four of Fire and the Wet, Earth and the wide Air of the World. To find the other many elements, you must go to the laboratory and hunt them down. But the four we have always with us, they are our world. Or rather, they have us with them.

I can give you a spirit love, I have given you this long, long time; but not embodied passion. See, you are a nun. I have given you what I would give a holy nun...In all our relations no body enters. I do not talk to you through the senses - rather through the spirit. That is why we cannot love in the common sense.