Whoever you are, go out into the evening, leaving your room, of which you know every bit; your house is the last before the infinite, whoever you are.

Whoever you are: in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything; yours is the last house before the far-off: whoever you are. With your eyes, which in their weariness barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold, you lift very slowly one black tree and place it against the sky: slender, alone. And you have made the world. And it is huge and like a word which grows ripe in silence. And as your will seizes on its meaning, tenderly your eyes let it go.

The artist's experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss.

There are so many things about which some old man ought to tell one while one is little; for when one is grown one would know them as a matter of course.

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.

You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born.

And do not change. Do not divert your love from visible things. But go on loving what is good, simple and ordinary; animals and things and flowers, and keep the balance true.