And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.

If your everyday life appears to be unworthy subject matter, do not complain to life. Complain to yourself, Lament that you are not poet enough to call up its wealth.

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.

Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy of being No-one's sleep under so many lids.

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism.

Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way-and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.