Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.

Some day when I lose you, will you still be able to sleep, without me to whisper over you like a crown of linden branches?

What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude.

Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.

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

Be ahead of all farewells as if they were behind you, like the winter that is just departing.

Do you remember how life yearned out of childhood toward the "great thing?" I see that it is now yearning forth beyond the great thing toward the greater one.