The journey of love has been rather a lacerating, if well-worth-it, journey.

Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning it was not a Word, but a chirrup.

Be careful, then, and be gentle about death. For it is hard to die, it is difficult to go through the door, even when it opens.

You don't want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, so as to get a mental thrill out of them. It is allpurely secondary--and more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism.

There is a brief time for sex, and a long time when sex is out of place. But when it is out of place as an activity there still should be the large and quiet space in the consciousness where it lives quiescent. Old people can have a lovely quiescent sort of sex, like apples, leaving the young quite free for their sort.

A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.

When all comes to all, the most precious element in life is wonder. Love is a great emotion, and power is power. But both love and power are based on wonder.