The world is so great and rich, and life so full of variety, that you can never lack occasions for poems.

To be active is the primary vocation of man.

It is with art as with love: How can a man of the world,with all his distractions, keep the inwardness which an artist must possess if he hopes to attain perfection? That inwardness which the spectator must share if he is to understand the work as the artist wishes and hopes... Believe me, talents are like virtues; either you must love them for their own sake or renounce them altogether. And they are only recognized and rewarded when we have practised them in secret, like a dangerous mystery."

Freedom consists not in refusing to recognize anything above us, but in respecting something which is above us; for by respecting it, we raise ourselves to it, and, by our very acknowledgment, prove that we bear within ourselves what is higher, and are worthy to be on a level with it.

You don't love if you don't take the beloved's faults for virtues.

He is dead in this world who has no belief in another.

How can one learn to know oneself? Never by introspection, rather by action.