There are so many things about which some old man ought to tell one while one is little; for when one is grown one would know them as a matter of course.

So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

I don’t want to stand before you like a thing, shrewd, secretive. I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will, as it goes toward action. And in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times, when something is coming near, I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone. I want to unfold. I don’t want to be folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance.

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

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