Your voice, your eyes, your hands, your lips… Our silences, our words… Light that goes, light that returns. A single smile between us. In quest of knowledge, I watched night create day while we seemed unchanged. O beloved of all, beloved of one alone, your mouth silently promised to be happy. Away, away says hate; [...]
There is no true prayer without suffering. False prayer asks relief from suffering. True prayer asks the strength to bear it. True prayer is patient and persistent. False prayer is halting and impatient. The individual who prays truly is humble and finds the experience of prayer humbling. The individual who prays falsely bolsters his own [...]
What is a poet? A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music. His fate is like that of the unfortunate victims whom the tyrant Phalaris imprisoned in a brazen [...]
Not merely philosophy but also the fine arts work at bottom toward the solution of the problem of existence. For in every mind that once gives itself up to the purely objective contemplation of the world, a desire has been awakened, however concealed and unconscious, to comprehend the true nature of things, of life, and [...]
Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time. To journey is to be born and die each minute. Perhaps somewhere in the vague recesses of his mind he perceived parallels between this series of dissolving views and our human life. All the elements of [...]
In this city they nonchalantly abandon themselves to the most extravagant possibilities. In their usual existence they constantly confuse what is extraordinary with what is forbidden, so that the expectation of something marvelous, which they now permit themselves, appears on their faces as an expression of coarse licentiousness. The awareness that I knew this city [...]
There he stands in the midst of all the noisy summonses and importunities of the day, of the necessities of life, of society, of the state – as what? Perhaps as though he were the only one awake, the only one aware of the real and true, among confused and tormented sleepers, among sufferers deluded [...]
It is this admirable, this immortal sense of Beauty which makes us regard the Earth and its sights as a glimpse, a correspondence of Heaven. Our insatiable thirst for everything which is beyond and which is revealed by life is the most living proof of our immortality. It is at once by and through poetry, [...]
And the task of modern art, too, suddenly becomes clear: stupefaction or delirium! To put to sleep or to intoxicate! To silence the conscience, by one means or the other! To help the modern soul to forget its feeling of guilt, not to help it to return to innocence! And this at least for moments [...]
How I love to look, dear indolent one, at your beautiful body and see, like a shot silk, the changing gleam of your skin! On your deep hair, with its bitter perfumes, a scented and wandering sea of blue and brown waves, Like a ship stirring with the wind of morning my dreamy soul sets [...]
