Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly they are passed on unopened.

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.

And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses - would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories?

True singing is a different breath, about nothing.

with poems one accomplishes so little when one writes them early. One should hold off and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, right at the end, one could perhaps write ten lines that are good.

There are moments in which a rose is more important than a piece of bread

For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences.