The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat held for it by a row of ancient trees; you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight, one journeying to heaven, one that falls; and leave you, not at home in either one, not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses, not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes a star each night, and rises; and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel) your life, with its immensity and fear, so that, now bounded, now immeasurable it is alternately stone in you and star.

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

Wanting to change, to improve, a person's situation means offering him, for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced, other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered.

In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.

Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism.