Understand, I'll slip quietly away from the noisy crowd when I see the pale stars rising, blooming, over the oaks. I'll pursue solitary pathways through the pale twilit meadows with only this one dream: You come too.

Somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work. Help me in saying it, to understand it.

And yet, for some time now I have believed that it is our own force, all our own force that is still too great for us. It is true we do not know it; but is it not just that which is most our own of which we know the least?

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves...At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer.

In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive, filling it with sublimity and exaltation.

Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.