What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude.

It’s possible, I’m moving through the hard veins of heavy mountains, like an arc, alone; I’m so deep inside, I see no end in sight, and no distance: everything is getting near and everything near is turning to stone.

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

Speaking of August Rodin: He raised his world above us in an immense arc, and made it a part of nature.

[A]t bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.

Painting is something that takes place among the colors.