All these years I've had a story in my mind, the story about us that never really existed. And because of that story, I've kept you framed up on the wall in a little box of nostalgic moonlight.
In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.
Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.
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.
The Church is the Church only when it exists for others...not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell men of every calling what it means to live for Christ, to exist for others.
In other times it may have been the business of Christianity to champion the equality of all men; its business today will be to defend passionately human dignity and reserve.
Perhaps all the dragons of your life are princesses, who are only waiting for us to show a little beauty and courage. Perhaps at the very bottom every horror is something helpless, that wants help from us
For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it becomes clear that most people get to know only one corner of their room, a window seat, a strip of floor which they pace up and down.
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.
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.
It is no use to ask God with factitious earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality filled with the desire for B. We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.
Let your judgements have their own quiet, undisturbed development, which must, like all progress, come from deep within, and cannot in any way be pressed or hurried.
There’s no easier way to cure foolishness than to give a man leave to be foolish. And the only way to show a fellow that he’s chosen the wrong business is to let him try it.
Words need to be sown like seeds. No matter how tiny a seed may be, when in lands in the right sort of ground it unfolds its strength and from being minute expands and grows to a massive size.
Each day acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes as well; and after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested that day
I have learned to be a friend to myself Great improvement this indeed Such a one can never be said to be alone for know that he who is a friend to himself is a friend to all mankind
Sometimes I wonder if we're all a little like Harold (a rooster). Real life carries on around us while we strut around in our own yards, thinking we're the ones in charge of things.
I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
Waiting for a book to be published is like having a baby. It would be nine months before we heard the patter of tiny pages trotting through the letter box, and the bookcase shuffled it's shelves in boredom and I was a martyr to morning sickness.
She didn’t think that by hanging a chandelier from the ceiling you made a room with a chandelier. She felt you’d made another world, which you could slip in and out of by some vague process of application
