If indeed you must be candid, be candid beautifully.

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy. For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger. And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine. And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man's ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.

Because the soul is like a flower that folds its petals when dark comes, and breathes not its fragrance into the phantoms of the night.

To love life through our labor is to be intimate with life's inmost secrets.

Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.

My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear — a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence. The "I" in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable.

Of life's two chief prizes, beauty and truth, I found the first in a loving heart and the second in a laborer's hand.