This above all-ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple "I must," then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. Then draw near to Nature. Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.

It is part of the nature of every definitive love that sooner or later it can reach the beloved only in infinity.

If my devils are to leave me, I'm afraid my angels will take flight as well.

Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them.... Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

Often a star was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you out of the distant path, or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.

Bound by conventions, people tend to reach for what is easy. Here we must be unafraid of what is difficult. For all living beings in nature must unfold in their particular way and become themselves despite all opposition.