Maria Quotes

In the depths all becomes law.

Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.

Dig deep into your heart, where the answer spreads its roots in your being, and ask yourself solemnly, Must I write?

More unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

Learn to love the questions themselves.

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.

Never has grief been possessed, never has love been learned, and what removes us in death is not revealed.

Across the moment, aeons speak with aeons. More than we experienced has gone by.

Now for some heartwork.

Poetic power is great, strong as a primitive instinct; it has its own unyielding rhythms in itself and breaks out as out of mountains.

For bel.i.eve me, the more one is, the richer is all one experiences. And whoever wants to have deep love in his life must collect and save for it and gather honey.

Swells, Marina? we ocean, depths, Marina? we sky!

As the arrow endures the string, and in the gathering momentum becomes more than itself. Because to stay is to be nowhere.

A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development.

To be in circumstances that are working upon us, that from time to time place us in front of great natural Things - that is all we need.

Of all my books, I find only a few indispensible.

Some day when I lose you, will you still be able to sleep, without me to whisper over you like a crown of linden branches?

We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most intimate.

Earth, is not this what you will: in us to rise up invisible? Is it, O Earth, not your dream once to be wholly invisible? Earth! Invisible! What, if not change, is your desperate mission?

As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.

And when suddenly the god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry, uttered the words: ‘He has turned round’ – she comprehended nothing and said softly: ‘Who?

To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb creatures in the world's full reserve, the unsayable sums, joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.

It was not in me It came and went I wanted to hold it It was held by wine (I no longer know what it was)

Be forever dead in Eurydice-more gladly arise into the seamless life proclaimed in your song. Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days, be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.

Only those sadnesses are dangerous and bad which one carries about among people in order to drown them out.

Draw near to Nature. Then try like some first human being to say what you see and experience and love and lose.

The artist's task consists of making one thing of many, and a world from the smallest part of a thing.

Love the questions themselves...Live the questions now and have confidence that someday far into the future, [I will live my] way into the answer.

What do the contours of your body mean, laid out like the lines on a hand, so that I no longer see them except as fate?

Do not, do not, do not books for ever hammer at people like perpetual bells? When, between two books, silent sky appears: be glad

That is longing: To dwell in the flux of things, To have no home in the present. And these are wishes: gentle dialogues Of the poor hours with eternity.

There may be good, but there are no pleasant marriages.

It is good to say it aloud: 'Nothing has happened.' Once again: 'Nothing has happened.' Does that help?"

Stand up during supper and walk outdoors, and keep on walking.

Speaking of August Rodin: He raised his world above us in an immense arc, and made it a part of nature.

Ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write [create]? Dig into yourself for a deep answer.

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism.

Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly.

Dying is strange and hard if it is not our death, but a death that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none within us.

Life and death: they are one, at core entwined. Who understands himself from his own strain presses himself into a drop of wine and throws himself into the purest flame.

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads Of her life, and weaves them gratefully Into a single cloth – It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall And clears it for a different celebration.

It wasn't his, it wasn't my fault, we both had nothing except patience, but Death has none. I saw him come (how meanly!) and I watched him as he took and took: none of it I could claim as mine.

Look, lovers: almost separately they come towards us through the flowery grass and slowly; parting's so far from thought of, they indulge the extravagance of walking unembraced.

True singing is a different breath, about nothing.

I would like to step out of my heart and go walking beneath the enormous sky.

To work is to live without dying.

You are nearing the land that is life; you will recognize it by its seriousness.

My art is representational by choice....if the art of painting is to survive, it must describe and express people, their lives and times. It must communicate.

Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy of being No-one's sleep under so many lids.

Do you remember how life yearned out of childhood toward the "great thing?" I see that it is now yearning forth beyond the great thing toward the greater one.