with poems one accomplishes so little when one writes them early. One should hold off and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, right at the end, one could perhaps write ten lines that are good.

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

As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still, it is we who move in infinite space.

There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.

Only those sadnesses are dangerous and bad which one carries about among people in order to drown them out.

Sex is difficult, yes. But they are difficult things with which we have been charged...If you only recognize this and manage out of yourself, out of your own nature and ways, out of your own experience and childhood and strength to achieve a relation to sex wholly your own (not influenced by convention and custom) then you need no longer be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your best possession.

And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses - would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories?