There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.

It is so often on the name of a misdeed that a life goes to pieces, not the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a perfectly definite necessity of that life and would have been absorbed by it without effort.

most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.

Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'hierarchies? and even if one of thempressed me against his heart: I would be consumedin that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothingbut the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,and we are so awed because it serenely disdainsto annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.

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