...a carefree letting go of oneself, not a caution, but a wise blindness.

Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.

All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.

To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one.

There exists a creature which is perfectly harmless; when it passes before your eyes you scarcely notice it and forget it again immediately. But as soon as it invisibly gets somehow into your ears, it develops there, it hatches, as it were, and cases have been known where it was penetrated even into the brain and has thriven devastatingly in that organ, like those pneumococci in dogs that gain entrance through the nose.This creature is one's neighbor.

I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life.

For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breathe ourselves out and away; with each new heartfire we give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us: you're in my blood, this room, Spring itself is filled with you . . . To what end? He can't hold us, we vanish within him and around him.