And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been

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 only journey is the one within.

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

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

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.

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.

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

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.

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

Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant...

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.

If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow

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.

Think... of the world you carry within you.

You are not too old and it is not too late to dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out it's own secret

Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.

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

That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.

If we surrendered to earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.

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.

But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.

Every angel is terrifying.

I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?

Everything terrible is something that needs our love.

I am the rest between two notes which are somehow always in discord.

If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.

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.

I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.

There are no classes in life for beginners: right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.

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 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?

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.

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.

Our heart always transcends us.

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.

Shattered people are best represented by bits and pieces.

Comfort me from wherever you are–alone, we are quickly worn out; if I place my head on the road, let it seem softened by you. Could it be that even from afar we offer each other a gentle breath?

But there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere.

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.

Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, seperate, in the evening.

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.

Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand already quite near its transformation.

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.

All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.

Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.

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.

He does not always remain bent over the pages; he often leans back and closes his eyes over a line he has been reading again, and its meaning spreads through his blood.