Quotes About Presence

Beauty will become paltry and insignificant when one looks for it only in what is pleasing; there it might be found occasionally but it resides and lies awake in each thing where it encloses itself, and it emerges only for the individual who believes that it is present everywhere and who will not move on until he has stubbornly coaxed it forth.

Angels (it is said) are often never quite sure whether they pass among the living or the dead.

But this press of time—take it as a little thing next to what endures. All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.

I rouse you with loud knocking, I do so only because I seldom hear you breathe

You don't survive in me because of memories; nor are you mine because of a lovely longing's strength. What does make you present is the ardent detour that a slow tenderness traces in my blood. I do not need to see you appear; being born sufficed for me to lose you a little less.

I don't invent you at sadly cooled-off places from which you've gone away; even your not being there is warm with you and more real and more than a privation. Longing leads out too often into vagueness. Why should I cast myself, when, for all I know, your influence falls on me, gently, like moonlight on a window seat.

I want to utter you. I want to portray you not with lapis or gold, but with colors made of apple bark. There is no image I could invent that your presence would not eclipse.

I think of you at any time of the day and my worried thoughts accompany all your steps. The slightest breath on your forehead is a kiss from my lips and each dream speaks to you with my voice. My love is like a coat wrapped around you to protect and warm you up." —from letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé

The sleeping and the waking, the bright and the dark, the voice and the silence... la présence et l'absence. All the presumed opposites which converge somewhere in one point where they sing the hymn of their union--and this place is, for the time being, our heart.

The main thing was to be living. That was the main thing.

Verweilung, auch am Verstrautesten nicht, ist uns gegeben

ghost of a distant author, with the disturbing presence of the foreign text, and with the phantom of the reader.

One has to be able at every moment to place one's hand on the earth like the first human being.

Stiller Freund der vielen Fernen, fühle, wie dein Atem noch den Raum vermehrt.

I have my dead and I have let them go and been surprised, to see them so consoled, so soon at home in death, just right this way, so unlike what we hear. Only you, you come back; you brush against me, you move about, you want to knock into things, to make them sound of you, telling me you're here. Oh don't take away what I'm slowly learning.

Come here into the candlelight. I'm not afraid to look at the dead. For when the dead come they have as much right to sojourn in our gaze as any other thing.

Wir haben nie, nicht einen einzigen Tag, den reinen Raum vor uns, in den die Blumen unendlich aufgehn.

It is you; you are the light around these familiar intimate things.

Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love... Life always says Yes and No simultaneously. Death (I implore you to believe) is the true Yea-sayer. It stands before eternity and says only: Yes.

It is good to say it out loud: 'Nothing happened.' Once more: 'Nothing happened.' Does that help at all?

a ghost, though invisible, still is like a place

Do not observe yourself too much. Do not draw too hasty conclusions from what happens to you; just let it happen.

if there is nothing in common between you and other people, try being close to things, they will not desert you; there are the nights still and the winds that go through the trees and across many lands; among things and with the animals everything is still full of happening;

I have my dead, and I have let them go, and was amazed to see them so contented, so soon at home in being dead, so cheerful, so unlike their reputation. Only you return, brush past me, loiter, try to knock against something, so that the sound reveals your presence. Oh don't take from me what I am slowly learning. I am sure you have gone astray if you are moved to homesickness for anything in this dimension.