Great Throughts Treasury

"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."

"It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart."

"It is true that these mysteries are dreadful, and people have always drawn away from them. But where can we find anything sweet and glorious that would never wear this mask, the mask of the dreadful? Whoever does not, sometimes or other, give his full consent, his full and joyous consent to the dreadfulness of life, can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence; can only walk on its edge, and one day, when the judgment is given, will have been neither alive nor dead."

"It must be immense, this silence, in which sounds and movements have room, and if one thinks that along with all this the presence of the distant sea also resounds, perhaps as the innermost note in this prehistoric harmony, then one can only wish that you are trustingly and patiently letting the magnificent solitude work upon you, this solitude which can no longer be erased from your life; which, in everything that is in store for you to experience and to do, will act as an anonymous influence, continuously and gently decisive, rather as the blood of our ancestors incessantly moves in us and combines with our own to form the unique, unrepeatable being that we are at every turning of our life."

"It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate."

"It wasn't his, it wasn't my fault, we both had nothing except patience, but Death has none. I saw him come (how meanly!) and I watched him as he took and took: none of it I could claim as mine. "

"It's possible I'm moving through the hard veins of heavy mountains, like the ore does, alone; I'm already so deep inside, I see no end in sight, and no distance: everything is getting near and everything getting near is turning to stone. I still can't see very far yet into suffering,"

"Joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness."

"Jubilation knows and longing grants "

"Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle."

"Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through."

"Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer."

"Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything."

"Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, no feeling is final."

"Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always."

"Let your beauty manifest itself without talking and calculation.? You are silent. It says for you: I am. And comes in meaning thousandfold?; comes at long last over everyone."

"Life - a sexually transmitted terminal condition."

"Life is cut to allow for growth... one may vigorously put on weight before one fills it out entirely."

"Life is heavier than the weight of all things."

"Long you must suffer, knowing not what,"

"Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future lessens "

"Look: the trees exist; the houses we dwell in stand there stalwartly. Only we pass by it all, like a rush of air. And everything conspires to keep quiet about us, half out of shame perhaps, half out of some secret hope."

"LOSING: Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation. When something's let go of, it circles; and though we are rarely the center of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve."

"Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other."

"Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become world, to become world for himself for another's sake. It is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things."

"Love is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack."

"Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in the hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away."

"Love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. Your solitude will be a support and a home for you."

"Lovers, if Angels could understand them, might utter strange things in the midnight air. For it seems that everything's trying to hide us. Look, the trees exist; the houses we live in still stand where they were. We only pass everything by like a transposition of air. And all combines to suppress us, partly as shame, perhaps, and partly as inexpressible hope."

"Make yourself fierce; break in."

"May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children."

"May you find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith."

"May you gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people."

"More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed."

"More unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life."

"Most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security... We, however, are not prisoners."

"Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings. You language where all language ends. You time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts. Feelings for whom? O you the transformation of feelings into what?--: into audible landscape. You stranger: music. You heart-space grown out of us. The deepest space in us, which, rising above us, forces its way out,-- holy departure: when the innermost point in us stands outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other side of the air: pure, boundless, no longer habitable."

"MUSIC: Take me by the hand; it's so easy for you, Angel, for you are the road even while being immobile. You see, I'm scared no one here will look for me again; I couldn't make use of whatever was given, so they abandoned me. At first the solitude charmed me like a prelude, but so much music wounded me."

"My life is not this steeply sloping hour, in which you see me hurrying. Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree; I am only one of my many mouths, and at that, the one that will be still the soonest. I am the rest between two notes, which are somehow always in discord because Death"

"Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand."

"Never forget that solitude is my lot ... I implore those who love me to love my solitude."

"No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others."

"No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger."

"No one can advise or help you, no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write."

"No, no, one can imagine nothing in the world, not the least thing. Everything is composed of so many isolated details that are not to be foreseen. In one's imagining one passes over them and hasty as one is doesn't notice that they are missing. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed."

"No, there is not more beauty here than elsewhere, and all these objects, continuously admired by generations and patched and mended by workmen's hands, signify nothing, are nothing, and have no heart and no value;-- but there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere."

"No, we don't accomplish our love in a single year as the flowers do; an immemorial sap flows up through our arms when we love. Dear girl, this: that we loved, inside us, not One who would someday appear, but seething multitudes; not just a single child, but also the fathers lying in our depths like fallen mountains; also the dried-up riverbeds of ancient mothers-;also the whole soundless landscape under the clouded or clear sky of its destiny -; all this, my dear, preceded you."

"Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life."

"Not into a beyond whose shadow darkens the earth, but into a whole, into the whole."

"Now we wake up with our memory and fix our gazes on that which was; whispering sweetness, which once coursed through us, sits silently beside us with loosened hair "