You, darkness, of whom I am born- I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes the rest.

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.

Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divinings, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.

The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.

O trees of life, O when are you wintering?We are not unified. We have no instinctslike those of migratory birds. Useless, and late,we force ourselves, suddenly, onto the wind,and fall down to an indifferent lake.We realise flowering and fading together.And somewhere lions still roam. Never knowing,as long as they have their splendour, of any weakness.

only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.

Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good.