That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.

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.

To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one.

Swells, Marina? we ocean, depths, Marina? we sky!

This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.

Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.

He who understands one thing understands everything, for the same laws are in all.