We know little, but that we must hold fast to what is difficult is a certainty that will never forsake us. It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it.

There is nothing less apt to touch a work of art than critical words: all we end up with there is more or less felicitous misunderstandings.

difficult things are what we were set to do, almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.

all feelings are pure that focus you and raise you up.

be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now.

A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. The verdict on it lies in this nature of its origin: there is no other.

Do not be distracted by surfaces; it is in the depths that all laws obtain.

For he who creates must be a world of his own and find everything within himself and in the natural world that he has elected to follow.

Everything must be carried to term before it is born. To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live as an