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But Suppose The Endlessly Dead Were To Wake In Us Some Emblem: They Might Point To The Catkins Hanging From The Empty Hazel Trees, Or Direct Us To The Rain Descending On Black Earth In Early Spring. --- And We, Who Always Think Of Happiness Rising, Would Feel The Emotion That Almost Baffles Us When A Happy Thing Falls.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

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But Suppose The Endlessly

Rainer Maria Rilke

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But Suppose The Endlessly Dead Were To Wake In Us Some Emblem: They Might Point To The Catkins Hanging From The Empty Hazel Trees, Or Direct Us To The Rain Descending On Black Earth In Early Spring. --- And We, Who Always Think Of Happiness Rising, Would Feel The Emotion That Almost Baffles Us When A Happy Thing Falls.

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Nothing Strange Should Befall Us, But Only That Which Has Long Belonged To Us. We Will Gradually Learn To Realize That That Which We Call Destiny Goes Forth From Within People, Not From Without Into Them.

Our Heart Always Transcends Us.

Here Is The Time For The Sayable, Here Is Its Home. Speak And Attest. More Than Ever The Things We Can Live With Are Falling Away, And Ousting Them, Filling Their Place, A Will With No Image. Will Beneath Crusts Which Readily Crack Whenever The Act Inside Swells And Seeks New Borders.

Success, Which Is Something So Simple In The End, Is Made Up Of Thousands Of Things, We Never Fully Know What.

Earth, Is Not This What You Will: In Us To Rise Up Invisible? Is It, O Earth, Not Your Dream Once To Be Wholly Invisible? Earth! Invisible! What, If Not Change, Is Your Desperate Mission?

Stand Up During Supper And Walk Outdoors, And Keep On Walking.

But Learning-time Is Always A Long, Secluded Time, And So Loving, For A Long While Ahead And Far On Into Life, Is-solitude, Intensified And Deepened Loneness For Him Who Loves.

Have Patience With Everything That Remains Unsolved In Your Heart. Do Not Despair If The Answers Don't Come Immediately. Some Answers Are Only Revealed With The Passage Of Time.

Fame Is Finally Only The Sum Total Of All The Misunderstanding That Can Gather Around A New Name.

Misunderstanding

I Live Not In Dreams But In Contemplation Of A Reality That Is Perhaps The Future.

Love Is Like The Measles. The Older You Get It, The Worse The Attack.

You Must Think That Something Is Happening Upon You, That Life Has Not Forgotten You, That It Holds You In Its Hand; It Will Not Let You Fall.

Our Being Is Continually Undergoing And Entering Upon Changes. ... We Must, Strictly Speaking, At Every Moment Give Each Other Up And Let Each Other Go And Not Hold Each Other Back.

And Your Doubt Can Become A Good Quality If You Train It. It Must Become Knowing, It Must Become Criticism. Ask It, Whenever It Wants To Spoil Something For You, Why Something Is Ugly, Demand Proofs From It, Test It, And You Will Find It Perhaps Bewildered And Embarrassed, Perhaps Also Protesting. But Don't Give In, Insist On Arguments, And Act In This Way, Attentive And Persistent, Every Single Time, And The Day Will Come When, Instead Of Being A Destroyer, It Will Become One Of Your Best Workers-perhaps The Most Intelligent Of All The Ones That Are Building Your Life.

Let Life Happen To You. Believe Me: Life Is In The Right, Always.

Everything Is Gestation And Then Birthing.

[a]t Bottom, And Just In The Deepest And Most Important Things, We Are Unutterably Alone, And For One Person To Be Able To Advise Or Even Help Another, A Lot Must Happen, A Lot Must Go Well, A Whole Constellation Of Things Must Come Right In Order Once To Succeed.

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.

Quiet Friend Who Has Come So Far, Feel How Your Breathing Makes More Space Around You. Let This Darkness Be A Bell Tower And You The Bell. As You Ring, What Batters You Becomes Your Strength. Move Back And Forth Into The Change. What Is It Like, Such Intensity Of Pain? If The Drink Is Bitter, Turn Yourself To Wine. In This Uncontainable Night, Be The Mystery At The Crossroads Of Your Senses, The Meaning Discovered There. And If The World Has Ceased To Hear You, Say To The Silent Earth: I Flow. To The Rushing Water, Speak: I Am.

Everyone Once, Once Only. Just Once And No More. And We Also Once. Never Again. But This Having Been Once, Although Only Once, To Have Been Of The Earth, Seems Irrevocable.

If No One Else, The Dying Must Notice How Unreal, How Full Of Pretense, Is All That We Accomplish Here, Where Nothing Is Allowed To Be Itself.

It Almost Seems As If Autumn Were The True Creator, More Creative Than The Spring, Which Is Too Even-toned, More Creative When It Comes With Its Will-to-change And Shatters The Much Too Ready-made, Self-satisfied And Really Almost Bourgeois-complacent Image Of Summer.

Learn To Love The Questions Themselves.

Who Has Not Sat Before His Own Heart's Curtain? It Lifts: And The Scenery Is Falling Apart.

Falling In Love

So We Are Grasped By What We Cannot Grasp.

Where Something Becomes Extremely Difficult And Unbearable, There We Also Stand Always Already Quite Near Its Transformation.

Fig Tree, How Long It's Been Full Meaning For Me, The Way You Almost Entirely Omit To Flower And Into The Seasonably-resolute Fruit Uncelebratedly Thrust Your Purest Secret. Like The Tube Of A Fountain, Your Bent Bough Drives The Sap Downwards And Up: And It Leaps From Its Sleep, Scarce Waking, Into The Joy Of Its Sweetest Achievement.

That Is Longing: To Dwell In The Flux Of Things, To Have No Home In The Present. And These Are Wishes: Gentle Dialogues Of The Poor Hours With Eternity.

And You Suddenly Know: It Was Here! You Pull Yourself Together, And There Stands An Irrevocable Year Of Anguish And Vision And Prayer.

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.

Every Happiness Is The Child Of A Separation It Did Not Think It Could Survive.

We See The Brightness Of A New Page Where Everything Yet Can Happen.

It Is Good To Say It Aloud: 'nothing Has Happened.' Once Again: 'nothing Has Happened.' Does That Help?"

The Creator Must Be A World For Himself And Must Find Everything In Himself And In Nature, To Whom His Whole Life Is Devoted.

But There Is Much Beauty Here, Because There Is Much Beauty Everywhere.

Beauty Everywhere

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.

Go Into Yourself. Dig Into Yourself For A Deep Answer

Art Too Is Just A Way Of Living, And However One Lives, One Can, Without Knowing, Prepare For It; In Everything Real One Is Closer To It, More Its Neighbor, Than In The Unreal Half-artistic Professions, Which, While They Pretend To Be Close To Art, In Practice Deny And Attack The Existence Of All Art - As, For Example, All Of Journalism Does And Almost All Criticism And Three Quarters Of What Is Called (and Wants To Be Called) Literature.

And I Circle Ten Thousand Years Long; And I Still Don't Know If I'm A Falcon, A Storm, Or An Unfinished Song

Rose, Oh Pure Contradiction, Joy Of Being No-one's Sleep Under So Many Lids.

The Hero Is Strangely Akin To Those Who Die Young.

Deeply I Go Down Into Myself. My God Is Dark And Like A Webbing Made Of A Hundred Roots That Drink In Silence.

Strangely, I Heard A Stranger Say, I Am With You.

Across The Moment, Aeons Speak With Aeons. More Than We Experienced Has Gone By.

True Singing Is A Different Breath, About Nothing.

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.

The Only Sadnesses That Are Dangerous And Unhealthy Are The Ones That We Carry Around In Public In Order To Drown Them Out With The Noise.

There Exists A Creature Which Is Perfectly Harmless; When It Passes Before Your Eyes You Scarcely Notice It And Forget It Again Immediately. But As Soon As It Invisibly Gets Somehow Into Your Ears, It Develops There, It Hatches, As It Were, And Cases Have Been Known Where It Was Penetrated Even Into The Brain And Has Thriven Devastatingly In That Organ, Like Those Pneumococci In Dogs That Gain Entrance Through The Nose.this Creature Is One's Neighbor.

Truly It Is Glorious, Our Being Here.

Why Don't You Think Of [god] As The One Who Is Coming, Who Has Been Approaching From All Eternity... The Ultimate Fruit Of A Tree Whose Leaves We Are.

To Have A Childhood Means To Live A Thousand Lives Before The One.

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.

Swells, Marina? We Ocean, Depths, Marina? We Sky!

Be Patient Toward All That Is Unsolved In Your Heart And Try To Love The Questions Themselves, Like Locked Rooms And Like Books That Are Now Written In A Very Foreign Tongue. Do Not Now Seek The Answers, Which Cannot Be Given You Because You Would Not Be Able To Live Them. And The Point Is, To Live Everything. Live The Questions Now. Perhaps You Will Then Gradually, Without Noticing It, Live Along Some Distant Day Into The Answer.

Winning Does Not Tempt That Man. This Is How He Grows: By Being Defeated, Decisively, By Constantly Greater Beings.

I Want To Be With Those Who Know Secret Things Or Else Alone.

Let Everything Happen To You Beauty And Terror Just Keep Going No Feeling Is Final

More Belongs To Marriage Than Four Legs In A Bed.

Works Of Art Are Of An Infinite Solitude, And No Means Of Approach Is So Useless As Criticism. Only Love Can Touch And Hold Them And Be Fair To Them.

Whoever Has No House Now, Will Never Have One. Whoever Is Alone Will Stay Alone, Will Sit, Read, Write Long Letters Through The Evening, And Wander On The Boulevards, Up And Down, Restlessly, While Dry Leaves Are Blowing.

Why Should You Want To Give Up A Child's Wise Not-understanding In Exchange For Defensiveness And Scorn, Since Not-understanding Is, After All, A Way Of Being Alone, Whereas Defensiveness And Scorn Are A Participation In Precisely What, By These Means, You Want To Separate Yourself From.

He Reproduced Himself With So Much Humble Objectivity, With The Unquestioning, Matter Of Fact Interest Of A Dog Who Sees Himself In A Mirror And Thinks: There's Another Dog.

If You Trust In Nature, In The Small Things That Hardly Anyone Sees And That Can So Suddenly Become Huge, Immeasurable; If You Have This Love For What Is Humble And Try Very Simply, As Someone Who Serves, To Win The Confidence Of What Seems Poor, Then Everything Will Become Easier For You.

You Must Give Birth To Your Images. They Are The Future Waiting To Be Born. Fear Not The Strangeness You Feel. The Future Must Enter You Long Before It Happens. Just Wait For The Birth, For The The Hour Of The New Clarity.

Dying Is Strange And Hard If It Is Not Our Death, But A Death That Takes Us By Storm, When We've Ripened None Within Us.

If We Surrendered To Earth's Intelligence We Could Rise Up Rooted, Like Trees.

Be Ahead Of All Parting, As Though It Already Were Behind You, Like The Winter That Has Just Gone By. For Among These Winters There Is One So Endlessly Winter That Only By Wintering Through It Will Your Heart Survive.

Is Not Impermanence The Very Fragrance Of Our Days?

Perhaps All The Dragons Of Our Lives Are Princesses Who Are Only Waiting To See Us Once Beautiful And Brave.

Young People, Who Are Beginners In Everything, Cannot Yet Know Love: They Have To Learn It.

There Are Quite A Number Of People In The Reading-room; But One Is Not Aware Of Them. They Are Inside The Books. They Move, Sometimes, Within The Pages Like Sleepers Turning Over Between Two Dreams. Ah, How Good It Is To Be Among People Who Are Reading.

Make Your Ego Porous. Will Is Of Little Importance, Complaining Is Nothing, Fame Is Nothing. Openness, Patience, Receptivity, Solitude Is Everything.

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?

Be Patient With All That Is Unsolved In Your Life. Learn To Love The Questions Themselves, Until Some Distant Day, Without Your Knowing, You Will Have Lived Into The Answers.

Weren't You Always Distracted By Expectation, As If Every Event Announced A Beloved? (where Can You Find A Place To Keep Her, With All The Huge Strange Thoughts Inside You Going And Coming And Often Staying All Night.).

Every Angel Is Terrifying.

Your Life Will Still Find Its Own Paths From There, And That They May Be Good, Rich, And Wide Is What I Wish For You, More Than I Can Say.

I Am Circling Around God, Around The Ancient Tower, And I Have Been Circling For A Thousand Years, And I Still Don't Know If I Am A Falcon, Or A Storm, Or A Great Song.

How I Will Cherish You Then, You Grief-torn Nights! Had I Only Received You, Inconsolable Sisters, On More Abject Knees, Only Buried Myself With More Abandon In Your Loosened Hair. How We Waste Our Afflictions! We Study Them, Stare Out Beyond Them Into Bleak Continuance, Hoping To Glimpse Some End. Whereas They're Really Our Wintering Foliage, Our Dark Greens Of Meaning, One Of The Seasons Of The Clandestine Year -- ; Not Only A Season --: They're Site, Settlement, Shelter, Soil, Abode.

Ideally A Painter (and, Generally, An Artist) Should Not Become Conscious Of His Insights: Without Taking The Detour Through His Reflective Processes, And Incomprehensibly To Himself, All His Progress Should Enter So Swiftly Into The Work That He Is Unable To Recognize Them In The Moment Of Transition. Alas, The Artist Who Waits In Ambush There, Watching, Detaining Them, Will Find Them Transformed Like The Beautiful Gold In The Fairy Tale Which Cannot Remain Gold Because Some Small Detail Was Not Taken Care Of.

Who Is There Today Who Still Cares About A Well-finished Death? No One. Even The Rich, Who Could After All Afford This Luxury, Are Beginning To Grow Lazy And Indifferent; The Desire To Have A Death Of One's Own Is Becoming More And More Rare. In A Short Time It Will Be As Rare As A Life Of One's Own.

In The Depths All Becomes Law.

To Love Is Good, Too: Love Being Difficult. 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. Love Is A High Inducement To The Individual To Ripen, To Become Something In Himself, 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.

Beauty Is Only The Start Of Bearable Terror.

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.

His Vision, From The Constantly Passing Bars, Has Grown So Weary That It Cannot Hold Anything Else. It Seems To Him There Are A Thousand Bars, And Behind The Bars, No World. As He Paces In Cramped Circles, Over And Over, The Movement Of His Powerful Soft Strides Is Like A Ritual Dance Around A Center In Which A Mighty Will Stands Paralyzed. Only At Times, The Curtain Of The Pupils Lifts, Quietly. An Image Enters In, Rushes Down Through The Tense, Arrested Muscles, Plunges Into The Heart And Is Gone.

If There Is Nothing You Can Share With Other People, Try To Be Close To Things, They Will Not Abandon You; And The Nights Are Still Here And The Winds That Move Through The Trees And Across Many Lands; Everything In The World Of Things And Animals Is Still Filled With Happening, Which You Can Take Part In.

This Is In The End The Only Kind Of Courage That Is Required Of Us: The Courage To Face The Strangest, Most Unusual, Most Inexplicable Experiences That Can Meet Us.

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.

So It's Back Once More, Back Up The Slope. Why Do They Always Ruin My Rope With Their Cuts? I Felt So Ready The Other Day, Had A Real Foretaste Of Eternity In My Guts. Spoonfeeding Me Yet Another Sip From Life's Cup. I Don't Want It, Won't Take Any More Of It. Let Me Throw Up. Life Is Medium Rare And Good, I See, And The World Full Of Soup And Bread, But It Won't Pass Into The Blood For Me, Just Goes To My Head. It Makes Me Ill, Though Others It Feeds; Do See That I Must Deny It! For A Thousand Years From Now At Least I'm Keeping A Diet.

Think... Of The World You Carry Within You, And Call This Thinking Whatever You Want To: A Remembering Of Your Own Childhood Or A Yearning Toward A Future Of Your Own - Only Be Attentive To What Is Arising Within You, And Place That Above Everything You Perceive Around You. What Is Happening In Your Innermost Self Is Worthy Of Your Entire Love; Somehow You Must Find A Way To Work At It.

If You Will Cling To Nature, To The Simple In Nature, To The Little Things That Hardly Anyone Sees, And That Can So Unexpectedly Become Big And Beyond Measuring; If You Have This Love Of Inconsiderable Things And Seek Quite Simply, As One Who Serves, To Win The Confidence Of What Seems Poor: Then Everything Will Become Easier, More Coherent And Somehow More Conciliatory For You, Not In Your Intellect, Perhaps, Which Lags Marveling Behind, But In Your Inmost Consciousness, Waking And Cognizance.

People Have (with The Help Of Conventions) Oriented All Their Solutions Toward The Easy And Toward The Easiest Side Of The Easy; But It Is Clear That We Must Hold To What Is Difficult; Everything Alive Holds To It, Everything In Nature Grows And Defends Itself In Its Own Way And Is Characteristically And Spontaneously Itself, Seeks At All Costs To Be So And Against All Opposition.

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.

Somewhere There Is An Ancient Enmity Between Our Daily Life And The Great Work. Help Me In Saying It, To Understand It.

May What I Do Flow From Me Like A River, No Forcing And No Holding Back, The Way It Is With Children.

And Now We Welcome The New Year, Full Of Things That Have Never Been

Only Someone Who Is Ready For Everything, Who Doesn't Exclude Any Experience, Even The Most Incomprehensible, Will Live The Relationship With Another Person As Something Alive And Will Himself Sound The Depths Of His Own Being.

Now I Come To You Full Of Future. And From Habit We Begin To Live Our Past.

It Is Clear That We Must Embrace Struggle. Every Living Thing Conforms To It. Everything In Nature Grows And Struggles In Its Own Way, Establishing Its Own Identity, Insisting On It At All Cost, Against All Resistance.

Love Consists In This, That Two Solitudes Protect And Touch And Greet Each Other.

We Are Not Permitted To Linger, Even With What Is Most Intimate.

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

Believe In A Love That Is Being Stored Up For You Like An Inheritance, And Have Faith That In This Love There Is A Strength And A Blessing So Large That You Can Travel As Far As You Wish Without Having To Step Outside It.

What Is Needed Is, In The End, Simply This: Solitude, Great Inner Solitude.

At The Bottom No One In Life Can Help Anyone Else In Life; This One Experiences Over And Over In Every Conflict And Every Perplexity: That One Is Alone. That Isn't As Bad As It May First Appear; And Again It Is The Best Thing In Life That Each Should Have Everything In Himself; His Fate, His Future, His Whole Expanse And World.

Never Has Grief Been Possessed, Never Has Love Been Learned, And What Removes Us In Death Is Not Revealed.

The Necessary Thing Is After All But This; Solitude, Great Inner Solitude. Going Into Oneself For Hours Meeting No One - This One Must Be Able To Attain.

Verses Are Not, As People Think, Feelings (those One Has Early Enough) -- They Are Experiences. For The Sake Of A Verse One Must See Many Cities, Men, And Things, One Must Know The Animals Feel How Birds Fly, And Know The Gesture With Which The Little Flowers Open In The Morning.

You Have Had Many Sadnesses, Large Ones, Which Passed. ... But Please, Ask Yourself Whether These Large Sadnesses Haven't Rather Gone Right Through You [that Is, Passed Through You]. Perhaps Many Things Inside You Have Been Transformed; Perhaps Somewhere, Someplace Deep Inside Your Being, You Have Undergone Important Changes While You Were Sad.

And You Should Not Let Yourself Be Confused In Your Solitude By The Fact That There Is Something In You That Wants To Move Out Of It.

Everything Is Blooming Most Recklessly; If It Were Voices Instead Of Colors, There Would Be An Unbelievable Shrieking Into The Heart Of The Night.

A Good Marriage Is That In Which Each Appoints The Other Guardian Of His Solitude

It Is Always What I Have Already Said: Always The Wish That You May Find Patience Enough In Yourself To Endure, And Simplicity Enough To Believe; That You May Acquire More And More Confidence In That Which Is Difficult, And In Your Solitude Among Others. And For The Rest, Let Life Happen To You. Believe Me: Life Is Right, In Any Case.

Dig Deep Into Your Heart, Where The Answer Spreads Its Roots In Your Being, And Ask Yourself Solemnly, Must I Write?

Perhaps Then, Some Day Far In The Future, You Will Gradually, Without Even Noticing It, Live Your Way Into The Answer.

That’s Love: Two Lonely Persons Keep Each Other Safe And Touch Each Other And Talk To Each Other.

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.

Irony: Don't Let Yourself Be Controlled By It, Especially During Uncreative Moments.

The Sky Puts On The Darkening Blue Coat Held For It By A Row Of Ancient Trees; You Watch: And The Lands Grow Distant In Your Sight, One Journeying To Heaven, One That Falls; And Leave You, Not At Home In Either One, Not Quite So Still And Dark As The Darkened Houses, Not Calling To Eternity With The Passion Of What Becomes A Star Each Night, And Rises; And Leave You (inexpressibly To Unravel) Your Life, With Its Immensity And Fear, So That, Now Bounded, Now Immeasurable It Is Alternately Stone In You And Star.

Be-and Yet Know The Great Void Where All Things Begin, The Infinite Source Of Your Own Most Intense Vibration, So That, This Once, You May Give It Your Perfect Assent.

Don't Observe Yourself Too Closely. Don't Be Too Quick To Draw Conclusions From What Happens To You; Simply Let It Happen.

Painting Is Something That Takes Place Among The Colors, And One Has To Leave Them Alone Completely, So That They Can Settle The Matter Among Themselves. Their Intercourse: This Is The Whole Of Painting. Whoever Meddles, Arranges, Injects His Human Deliberation, His Wit, His Advocacy, His Intellectual Agility In Any Way, Is Already Disturbing And Clouding Their Activity.

Do Not Allow Yourself To Be Misled By The Surfaces Of Things

Go Into Yourself And See How Deep The Place Is From Which Your Life Flows.

Do Not Assume That He Who Seeks To Comfort You Now, Lives Untroubled Among The Simple And Quiet Words That Sometimes Do You Good. His Life May Also Have Much Sadness And Difficulty, That Remains Far Beyond Yours. Were It Otherwise, He Would Never Have Been Able To Find These Words.

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.

If We Only Arrange Our Life In Accordance With The Principle Which Tells Us That We Must Always Trust In The Difficult, Then What Now Appears To Us As The Most Alien Will Become Our Most Intimate And Trusted Experience. How Could We Forget Those Ancient Myths That Stand At The Beginning Of All Races, The Myths About Dragons That At The Last Moment Are Transformed Into Princesses? Perhaps All The Dragons In Our Lives Are Princesses Who Are Only Waiting To See Us Act, Just Once, With Beauty And Courage.

Poetic Power Is Great, Strong As A Primitive Instinct; It Has Its Own Unyielding Rhythms In Itself And Breaks Out As Out Of Mountains.

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.

The Deepest Experience Of The Creator Is Feminine, For It Is Experience Of Receiving And Bearing.

You Who Let Yourselves Feel: Enter The Breathing That Is More Than Your Own. Let It Brush Your Cheeks As It Divides And Rejoins Behind You. The Trees You Planted In Childhood Have Grown Too Heavy. You Cannot Bring Them Along. Give Yourselves To The Air, To What You Cannot Hold.

Fame, That Public Destruction Of One In Process Of Becoming, Into Whose Building-ground The Mob Breaks, Displacing His Stones.

She Followed Slowly, Taking A Long Time, As Though There Were Some Obstacles In The Way; And Yet: As Though, Once It Was Overcome, She Would Be Beyond All Walking, And Would Fly.

We Need, In Love, To Practice Only This: Letting Each Other Go. For Holding On Comes Easily; We Do Not Need To Learn It.

A Person Isn't Who They Are During The Last Conversation You Had With Them - They're Who They've Been Throughout Your Whole Relationship.

But You, Divine Poet, You Sang On Till The End As The Swarm Of Rejected Maenads Attacked You, Shrieking, You Overpowered Their Noise With Harmony, And From Pure Destruction Arose Your Transfigured Song.

Avoid Providing Material For The Drama That Is Always Stretched Tight Between Parents And Children; It Uses Up Much Of The Children’s Strength And Wastes The Love Of The Elders, Which Acts And Warms Even If It Doesn’t Comprehend. Don’t Ask For Advice From Them And Don’t Expect Any Understanding; But Believe In A Love That Is Being Stored Up For You Like An Inheritance, And Have Faith That In This Love There Is Strength And Blessing So Large That You Can Travel As Far As You Wish Without Having To Step Outside It.

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.

I Am Like A Child Who Awakes At The Light, So Safe And Securefree From Night's Fears When Dawn Breaks, In Thee I Am Ever Secure.

What We Fight With Is So Small, And When We Win, It Makes Us Small. What We Want Is To Be Defeated, Decisively, By Successively Greater Things

We Must Assume Our Existence As Broadly As We In Any Way Can; Everything, Even The Unheard - Of, Must Be Possible In It. This Is At Bottom The Only Courage That Is Demanded Of Us: To Have Courage For The Most Strange, The Most Inexplicable.

If There Is Anything Unhealthy In Your Reactions, Just Bear In Mind That Sickness Is The Means By Which An Organism Frees Itself From What Is Alien; So One Must Simply Help It To Be Sick, To Have Its Whole Sickness And To Break Out With It, Since That Is The Way It Gets Better.

There Are Moments In Which A Rose Is More Important Than A Piece Of Bread

Go On Loving What Is Good, Simple, And Ordinary.

Physical Pleasure Is A Sensual Experience No Different From Pure Seeing Or The Pure Sensation With Which A Fine Fruit Fills The Tongue; It Is A Great Unending Experience, Which Is Given Us, A Knowing Of The World, The Fullness And The Glory Of All Knowing. And Not Our Acceptance Of It Is Bad; The Bad Thing Is That Most People Misuse And Squander This Experience And Apply It As A Stimulant At The Tired Spots Of Their Lives And As Distraction Instead Of A Rallying Toward Exalted Moments.

Yet Everything That Touches Us, Me And You, Takes Us Together Like A Violin's Bow, Which Draws One Voice Out Of Two Separate Strings.

Everything That Makes More Of You Than You Have Ever Been, Even In Your Best Hours, Is Right. Every Intensification Is Good.

A Billion Stars Go Spinning Through The Night, / Glittering Above Your Head, / But In You Is The Presence That Will Be / When All The Stars Are Dead.

God... Sat Down For A Moment When The Dog Was Finished In Order To Watch It... And To Know That It Was Good, That Nothing Was Lacking, That It Could Not Have Been Made Better.

But Suppose The Endlessly Dead Were To Wake In Us Some Emblem: They Might Point To The Catkins Hanging From The Empty Hazel Trees, Or Direct Us To The Rain Descending On Black Earth In Early Spring. --- And We, Who Always Think Of Happiness Rising, Would Feel The Emotion That Almost Baffles Us When A Happy Thing Falls.

To Be Loved Means To Be Consumed. To Love Is To Give Light With Inexhaustible Oil. To Be Loved Is To Pass Away, To Love Is To Endure.

There Would Have To Be Bread, Some Rich, Whole-grain Bread And Zwieback, And Perhaps On A Long, Narrow Dish Some Pale Westphalian Ham Laced With Strips Of White Fat Like An Evening Sky With Bands Of Clouds. There Would Be Some Tea Ready To Be Drunk, Yellowish Golden Tea In Glasses With Silver Saucers, Giving Off A Faint Fragrance.

Love The Questions, Themselves.

Be Ahead Of All Parting, As Though It Already Were Behind You.

Interior Of The Hand. Sole That Has Come To Walk Only On Feelings. That Faces Upward And In Its Mirror Receives Heavenly Roads, Which Travel Along Themselves. That Has Learned To Walk Upon Water When It Scoops, That Walks Upon Wells, Transfiguring Every Path. That Steps Into Other Hands, Changes Those That Are Like It Into A Landscape: Wanders And Arrives Within Them, Fills Them With Arrival.

For Poems Are Not, As People Think, Simply Emotions (one Has Emotions Early Enough)-they Are Experiences.

Where I Create, There I Am True.

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.

Someday There Will Be Girls And Women Whose Name Will No Longer Mean The Mere Opposite Of The Male, But Something In Itself, Something That Makes One Think Not Of Any Complement And Limit, But Only Life And Reality: The Female Human Being.

Extinguish My Eyes, I'll Go On Seeing You. Seal My Ears, I'll Go On Hearing You. And Without Feet I Can Make My Way To You, Without A Mouth I Can Swear Your Name. Break Off My Arms, I'll Take Hold Of You With My Heart As With A Hand. Stop My Heart, And My Brain Will Start To Beat. And If You Consume My Brain With Fire, I'll Feel You Burn In Every Drop Of My Blood.

In The Difficult Are The Friendly Forces, The Hands That Work On Us.

I Could Give You No Advice But This: To Go Into Yourself And To Explore The Depths Where Your Life Wells Forth.

For Beauty Is Nothing But The Beginning Of Terror Which We Are Barely Able To Endure, And It Amazes Us So, Because It Serenely Disdains To Destroy Us. Every Angel Is Terrible.

The Future Enters Into Us, In Order To Transform Itself In Us, Long Before It Happens.

I Never Read Anything Concerning My Work. I Feel That Criticism Is A Letter To The Public Which The Author, Since It Is Not Directed To Him, Does Not Have To Open And Read.

Huge Lemons, Cut In Slices, Would Sink Like Setting Suns Into The Dusky Sea, Softly Illuminating It With Their Radiating Membranes, And Its Clear, Smooth Surface Aquiver From The Rising Bitter Essence.

And Still It Is Not Enough To Have Memories. One Must Be Able To Forget Them When They Are Many, And One Must Have The Great Patience To Wait Until They Come Again. For It Is Not Yet The Memories Themselves. Not Until They Have Turned To Blood Within Us, To Glance, To Gesture, Nameless And No Longer To Be Distinguished From Ourselves - Not Until Then Can It Happen That In A Most Rare Hour The First Word Of A Verse Arises In Their Midst And Goes Forth From Them.

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.

I Am Much Too Alone In This World, Yet Not Alone Enough

Every Intensification Is Good, If It Is In Your Entire Blood, If It Isn't Intoxication Or Muddiness, But Joy Which You Can See Into, Clear To The Bottom.

At No Other Time (than Autumn) Does The Earth Let Itself Be Inhaled In One Smell, The Ripe Earth; In A Smell That Is In No Way Inferior To The Smell Of The Sea, Bitter Where It Borders On Taste, And More Honeysweet Where You Feel It Touching The First Sounds. Containing Depth Within Itself, Darkness, Something Of The Grave Almost.

Be Ahead Of All Farewells As If They Were Behind You, Like The Winter That Is Just Departing.

Ah, Not To Be Cut Off, Not Through The Slightest Partition Shut Out From The Law Of The Stars. The Inner -- What Is It? If Not The Intensified Sky, Hurled Through With Birds And Deep With The Winds Of Homecoming.

We Are Continually Overflowing Toward Those Who Preceded Us, Toward Our Origin, And Toward Those Who Seemingly Come After Us. ... It Is Our Task To Imprint This Temporary, Perishable Earth Into Ourselves So Deeply, So Painfully And Passionately, That Its Essence Can Rise Again “invisibly,” Inside Us. We Are The Bees Of The Invisible. We Wildly Collect The Honey Of The Visible, To Store It In The Great Golden Hive Of The Invisible.

And We, Spectators Always, Everywhere, Looking At, Never Out Of, Everything! It Fills Us. We Arrange It. It Collapses. We Re-arrange It, And Collapse Ourselves. Who's Turned Us Round Like This, So That We Always, Do What We May, Retain The Attitude Of Someone Who's Departing? Just As He, On The Last Hill, That Shows Him All His Valley For The Last Time, Will Turn And Stop And Linger, We Live Our Lives, For Ever Taking Leave.

Go Into Yourself And Test The Deeps In Which Your Life Takes Rise; At Its Source You Will Find The Answer To The Question Whether You Must Create. Accept It, Just As It Sounds, Without Inquiring Into It. Perhaps It Will Turn Out That You Are Called To Be An Artist. Then Take That Destiny Upon Yourself And Bear It, Its Burden And Its Greatness, Without Ever Asking What Reward Might Come From Outside

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.

She Who Reconciles The Ill-matched Threads Of Her Life, And Weaves Them Gratefully Into A Single Cloth – It’s She Who Drives The Loudmouths From The Hall And Clears It For A Different Celebration.

Resolve To Be Always Beginning-to Be A Beginner!

The Thought Of Being A Creator, Of Engendering, Of Shaping Is Nothing Without The Continuous Great Confirmation And Embodiment In The World, Nothing Without The Thousandfold Assent From Things And Animals... Beautiful And Rich Only Because It Is Full Of Inherited Memories Of The Engendering And Birthing Of Millions.

Perhaps The Same Bird Echoed Through Both Of Us Yesterday, Seperate, In The Evening.

I Am Too Alone In The World And Not Alone Enough To Make Every Moment Holy.

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.

I Want To Love The Things As No One Has Thought To Love Them.

O Trees Of Life, O When Are You Wintering?we Are Not Unified. We Have No Instinctslike Those Of Migratory Birds. Useless, And Late,we Force Ourselves, Suddenly, Onto The Wind,and Fall Down To An Indifferent Lake.we Realise Flowering And Fading Together.and Somewhere Lions Still Roam. Never Knowing,as Long As They Have Their Splendour, Of Any Weakness.

We Make Our Way Through Everything Like Thread Passing Through Fabric, Giving Shape To Images That We Ourselves Do Not Know.

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.

You Have Had Many And Great Sadnesses, Which Passed. And You Say That Even This Passing Was Hard For You And Put You Out Of Sorts. But, Please, Consider Whether These Great Sadnesses Have Not Rather Gone Right Through The Center Of Yourself? Whether Much In You Has Not Altered, Whether You Have Not Somewhere, At Some Point Of Your Being, Undergone A Change When You Were Sad?

Openness, Patience, Receptivity, Solitude Is Everything.

I Hold This To Be The Highest Task For A Bond Between Two People: That Each Protects The Solitude Of The Other.

My Art Is Representational By Choice....if The Art Of Painting Is To Survive, It Must Describe And Express People, Their Lives And Times. It Must Communicate.

Those Tasks That Have Been Entrusted To Us Are Difficult; Almost Everything Serious Is Difficult; And Everything Is Serious.

Read As Little As Possible Of Literary Criticism - Such Things Are Either Partisan Opinions, Which Have Become Petrified And Meaningless, Hardened And Empty Of Life, Or Else They Are Just Clever Word-games, In Which One View Wins Today, And Tomorrow The Opposite View. Works Of Art Are Of An Infinite Solitude, And No Means Of Approach Is So Useless As Criticism.

I Learn It Every Day Of My Life, Learn It With Pain I Am Grateful For: Patience Is Everything!

Someday You Will Name Me, Then Gently Place Those Burning Holy Roses In My Hair.

You See, I Want A Lot. Perhaps I Want Everything The Darkness That Comes With Every Infinite Fall And The Shivering Blaze Of Every Step Up. So Many Live On And Want Nothing And Are Raised To The Rank Of Prince By The Slippery Ease Of Their Light Judgments But What You Love To See Are Faces That Do Work And Feel Thirst. You Love Most Of All Those Who Need You As They Need A Crowbar Or A Hoe. You Have Not Grown Old, And It Is Not Too Late To Dive Into Your Increasing Depths Where Life Calmly Gives Out Its Own Secret.

If Only We Arrange Our Life According To That Principle Which Counsels Us That We Must Hold To The Difficult, Then That Which Now Still Seems To Us The Most Alien Will Become What We Most Trust And Find Most Faithful.

Fame — The Aggregate Of All The Misunderstandings That Collect Around A New Name.

I Think Of You Often, Dear, And With Such Concentrated Wishes That It Really Must Help You In Some Way.

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