My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing.

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves...At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer.

Do not, do not, do not books for ever hammer at people like perpetual bells? When, between two books, silent sky appears: be glad

My life is not this steeply sloping hour, in which you see me hurrying. Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree; I am only one of my many mouths, and at that, the one that will be still the soonest. I am the rest between two notes, which are somehow always in discord because Death’s note wants to climb over— but in the dark interval, reconciled, they stay there trembling. And the song goes on, beautiful.

Stand up during supper and walk outdoors, and keep on walking.

This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.

If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.