Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

Do continue to believe that with your feeling and with your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate in yourself this belief, the more will reality and world go forth from it.

It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.

Live the questions now.

You are also the physician who must watch over yourself. But in the course of every illness there are many days in which the physician can do nothing but wait.

And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.

What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours-that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child.