Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury, are beginning to grow lazy and indifferent; the desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare. In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one's own.

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves...At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer.

My loving friend, you see, my life was never given a foundation, no one was able to imagine what it would want to become. In Venice there stands the so-called Ca del Duca, a princely foundation, on which later the most wretched tenement came to be built. With me it's the opposite: the beautiful arched elevations of my spirit rest on the most tentative beginning; a wooden scaffolding, a few boards....Is that why I feel inhibited in raising the nave, the tower to which the weight of the great bells is to be hoisted (by angels, who else could do it)?

You are nearing the land that is life; you will recognize it by its seriousness.

I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.

Truly it is glorious, our being here.