The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise.

Works of art always spring from those who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go. The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes.

Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

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.

Someday you will name me, then gently place those burning holy roses in my hair.

Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive.