Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside

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.

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.

Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.

Poetic power is great, strong as a primitive instinct; it has its own unyielding rhythms in itself and breaks out as out of mountains.

... be indulgent toward those who ... are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.

I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false.