Read the lines as if they were unknown to you, and you will feel in your inmost self how very much they are yours.

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.

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

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.

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.

Why don't you think of [God] as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity... the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are.

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.

That is fundamentally the only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things that can befall us

perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys

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.

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.

When you try to make others happy, happiness will follow you like your shadow forever.

It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you for it was the illusion they loved.

Look, whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.) Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

Sometimes I wonder what I'm a-gonna do 'Cause there ain't no cure for the summertime blues.

Does it ever occur to you, Mama, that my grandfather is a lunatic?

I love surprises and coincidences. I love them even more when I don't pass them off as luck, but rather recognize them as a sign that my life's course is right on track.

A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.

We are always living in the final days. What have you got? A hundred years or much, much less until the end of your world.

The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one’s view of the nature and destiny of man.

Necessity is stronger than duty.