Quotes About Life

Not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree.

Things are not all so comprehensible and utterable as people would mostly have us believe; most events are unutterable, consummating themselves in a sphere where word has never trod, and more unutterable than them all are works of art, whose life endures by the side of our own that passes away.

Is it possible that despite our inventions and progress, despite our culture, religion and knowledge of the world, we have remained on the surface of life?

I do not wish to say that one should love death; but one should love life so magnanimously, so without calculating and selecting, that love of death (the turned-away side of life) is continually and involuntarily included - which actually happens invariably in the great motions of love, which are impetuous and illimitable.

She was in herself, like a woman near term, and did not think of the man, going on ahead, or the path, climbing upwards towards life. She was in herself. And her being-dead filled her with abundance. As a fruit with sweetness and darkness, so she was full with her vast death.

Live for a while in these books, learn from them what you feel is worth learning, but most of all love them. This love will be returned to you thousands upon thousands of times, whatever your life may become — it will, I am sure, go through the while fabric of your becoming, as one of the most important threads among all the threads of your experiences, disappointments, and joys.

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

Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious.

I live my life in growing orbits which move out over the things of the world. Perhaps I can never achieve the last, but that will be my attempt. 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.

Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. No feeling is final.

A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity. In this manner of its origin lies its true estimate: there is no other. Therefore, my dear Sir, I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths whence your life wells forth; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create.

Früher wusste man (oder vielleicht ahnte man es), dass man den Tod in sich hatte wir die Frucht den Kern. Die Kinder hatten einen kleinen und die Erwachsenen einen großen. Die Frauen hatten ihn im Schoß und die Männer in der Brust. Den hatte man, und das gab einem eine eigentümliche Würde und einen stillen Stolz.

Who shows a child, just as they are? Who sets it in its constellation, and gives the measure of distance into its hand? Who makes a child's death out of grey bread, that hardens, - or leaves it inside its round mouth like the core of a shining apple? Killers are easy to grasp. But this: death, the whole of death, before life, to hold it so softly, and not live in anger, cannot be expressed.

No, my life is not this precipitous hour through which you see me passing at a run.

And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.

But if the endlessly dead awakened a symbol in us, perhaps they would point to the catkins hanging from the bare branches of the hazel-trees, or would evoke the raindrops that fall onto the dark earth in springtime.-- And we, who have always thought of happiness as rising , would feel the emotion that almost overwhelms us whenever a happy thing falls .

For somewhere reigns an old hostility / between living one's Life and doing one's Work.

What would you do, God, if I died?

IMPERMANENCE Driftsand of the hours. Quietly disappearing, continuously, even the happily consecrated design. Life blows away, always: pillars already rise without connection, carrying nothing but empty air.

The natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and with time to other insights... Everything is a gestation and then bringing forth.

All of our true relationships, all of our enduring experiences touch upon and pass through everything, Sidie, through life and death. We must live in both, be intimately at home in both.

Nowhere, beloved, can world be but within us. Our life passes in transformation. And the external dwindles away.

that which we call destiny goes forth from within people, not from without into them.

What an unilateral life, when from the material of a renunciation, we must fashion something we love.