Love the questions themselves...Live the questions now and have confidence that someday far into the future, [I will live my] way into the answer.

Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant.

What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours-that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings.

God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don't let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.

Do not be bewildered by the surfaces: in the depths all becomes law.

It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.