Every important cultural gesture comes down to a morality, a model for human behavior concentrated into a gesture.

You wouldn't consider all the bipeds you pass on the street human beings simply because they walk upright and carry their young in their bellies nine months! It is obvious how many of them are fish or sheep, worms or angels, how many are ants, how many are bees!

Love must not entreat,' she added, 'or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract.

Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk.

The river taught us how to listen with a silent heart, with a waiting open soul.

When you like someone, you like them in spite of their faults. When you love someone, you love them with their faults.

our friendship has no other purpose, no other reason, than to show you how utterly unlike me you are.