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.

That's the way it is when you love. It makes you suffer, and I have suffered much in the years since. But it matters little that you suffer, so long as you feel alive with a sense of the close bond that connects all living things, so long as love does not die!

Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.

Remember this: one can be a strict logician or grammarian and at the same time full of imagination and music.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Among mathematicians, even in those days, the reputation of being a good Glass Bead Game player meant a great deal; it was equivalent to being a very good mathematician.

Rain Soft rain, summer rain Whispers from bushes, whispers from trees. Oh, how lovely and full of blessing To dream and be satisfied. I was so long in the outer brightness, I am not used to this upheaval: Being at home in my own soul, Never to be led elsewhere. I want nothing, I long for nothing, I hum gently the sounds of childhood, And I reach home astounded In the warm beauty of dreams. Heart, how torn you are, How blessed to plow down blindly, To think nothing, to know nothing, Only to breathe, only to feel.