What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things

Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.

A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development.

Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand always already quite near its transformation.

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

Of all my books, I find only a few indispensible.

Go on loving what is good, simple, and ordinary.