And isn't the whole world yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept. You felt in such complete harmony with God, when every morning you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could have their turn. You thought it would be shabby to save them and repair them; you used them up and held out your hands, again and again, for more world. For your love was equal to everything.

It is so often on the name of a misdeed that a life goes to pieces, not the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a perfectly definite necessity of that life and would have been absorbed by it without effort.

What happens most deeply inside you is worthy of your whole love.

And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.

We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most intimate.

What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things

All things want to float.