Quotes About Reflection

My God, I thought with sudden vehemence, so you really are. There are proofs of your existence. I have forgotten them all and never even wanted any, for what a huge obligation would lie in the certainty of you.

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. Then the knowing comes: I can open to another life that's wide and timeless. So I am sometimes like a tree rustling over a gravesite and making real the dream of the one its living roots embrace: a dream once lost among sorrows and songs.

Yes, he knew that we was withdrawing from everything: not merely from human beings. A moment more and everything will have lost its meaning, and that table and the cup, and the chair to which he clings, all the near and the commonplace, will have become unintelligible, strange and heavy. So he sat there and waited until it should have happened. And defended himself no longer.

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue...Live the questions.

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?

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.

Amid these fading and decaying things, be the glass that rings out as it's breaking.

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.

For there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

But perhaps these are the very hours during which solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of spring.

Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.

Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition.

Oh quickly disappearing photograph in my more slowly disappearing hand.

Dirait-on Abandon entouré d'abandon, tendresse touchant aux tendresses ... C'est ton intérieur qui sans cesse se caresse, dirait-on; se caresse en soi-même, par son propre reflet éclairé. Ainsi tu inventes le thème du Narcisse exaucé.

I am thinking of a summer on the Baltic when I was a child: how talkative I was to sea and forest; how, filled with unaccustomed exuberance, I tried to leap over all limits with the hasty excitement of my words. And how, as I had to take my leave on a morning in September, I saw that we never give utterance to what is final and most blessed, and that all my rhapsodic Table d'hote conversations did not approach either my inchoate feelings or the ocean's eternal self-revelation.

But your solitude will be your home and haven even in the midst of very strange conditions, and from there you will discover all your paths.

Ich sitze und lese einen Dichter. Es sind viele Leute im Saal, aber man spürt sie nicht. Sie sind in den Büchern. Manchmal bewegen sie sich in den Blättern, wie Menschen, die schlafen und sich umwenden zwischen zwei Träumen. Ach, wie gut ist es doch, unter lesenden Menschen zu sein. Warum ist es nicht immer so?

We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.

there is only one solitude, and it is great and is not easy to bear, and to almost everyone there come hours when they would gladly exchange it for some kind of communion, however banal and cheap, for the appearance of some slight harmony with the most easily available, with the most undeserving. .

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

At last, after weeks of daily fending off, you get your bearings back, and somewhat dazed you tell yourself: No, there is not more beauty here than elsewhere, and all these objects which generation after generation have continued to admire, which inexpert hands have mended and restored, they mean nothing, and are nothing and have no heart and no value; but there is a great deal of beauty here, because there is beauty everywhere.

What would you do, God, if I died?

For here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

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. (Sei allem Abschied voran, als wäre er hinter dir, wie der Winter, der eben geht. Denn unter Wintern ist einer so endlos Winter, daß, überwinternd, dein Herz überhaupt übersteht.)