What can you ever really know of other people's souls — of their temptations,
If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him.
their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know:
and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands.
You cannot put Him off with speculations about your next door neighbours
or memories of what you have read in books.
C. S. Lewis
To the world you might be one person,
The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers
but to one person, you might be the world.
Kindness is the golden chain by which
our world is bound together.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
and cities;but to know someone who thinks and feels with us,
and who, though distant,is close to us in spirit, this makes
the earth for us an inhabited garden.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It is a mistake to think that the past is dead.
You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography;
every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read,
So with a city, a country, and a race; it is its past, and
Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment.
The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time.
you are what you are because of what you have been; because of
your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations;
because of every element of environment that has affected you,
every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in
your memory, your body, your character, your soul.
cannot be understood without it.
Will Durant
Trees like country preachers
On their rostrums,
Their arms raised in blessing
Over the evening fields.
Every leaf now, every weed
Helping the night
Darken and quiet the world
For what's to come.
CHARLES SIMIC
Your love lifts my soul from the body to the sky
And you lift me up out of the two worlds.
I want your sun to reach my raindrops,
So your heat can raise my soul upward like a cloud.
rumi
I think you can love a person too much.
You put someone up on a pedestal, and all of a sudden, from that perspective,
you notice what's wrong - a hair out of place, a run in a stocking, a broken bone.
You spend all your time and energy making it right, and all the while,
you are falling apart yourself. You don't even realize what you look like,
how far you've deteriorated, because you only have eyes for someone else.
Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
Everyone wants to be the sun to lighten up someone's life,
but why not be the moon, to brighten in the darkest hour?
You who never arrived
You who never arrived
Rainer Maria Rilke
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-- , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced
upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...”
You, You Only, Exist
You, you only, exist.
Rainer Maria Rilke
We pass away, till at last,
our passing is so immense
that you arise: beautiful moment,
in all your suddenness,
arising in love, or enchanted
in the contraction of work.
To you I belong, however time may
wear me away. From you to you
I go commanded. In between
the garland is hanging in chance; but if you
take it up and up and up: look:
all becomes festival!
Love song
How can I keep my soul in me, so that
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
Rainer Maria Rilke
it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.
takes us together like a violin's bow,
which draws *one* voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.
But real action is in silent moments.
The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice
of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like,
but in a silent thought by the wayside as we walk; in a thought which
revises our entire manner of life and says,—
"Thus hast thou done, but it were better thus".
Ralph Waldo Emerson
How weak our mind is; how quickly it is terrified and unbalanced
as soon as we are confronted with a small, incomprehensible fact.
Instead of dismissing the problem with: "We do not understand
because we cannot find the cause," we immediately imagine terrible
mysteries and supernatural powers.
Guy de Maupassant
Like a bird singing in the rain,
let grateful memories survive in time of sorrow.
Robert Louis Stevenson
A DIALOGUE
HE
SHE
HE
SHE
HE
SHE
HE
SHE
HE
SHE
HE
SHE
HE
SHE
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Let us be friends. My life is sad and lonely,
While yours with love is beautiful and bright.
Be kind to me: I ask your friendship only.
No Star is robbed by lending darkness light.
I give you friendship as I understand it,
A sentiment I feel for all mankind.
Oh, give me more; may not one friend command it?
Look in the skies, ’tis there the star you’ll find;
It casts its beams on all with equal favour.
I would have more than what all men may claim.
Then your ideas of friendship strongly savour
Of sentiments which wear another name.
May not one friend receive more than another?
Not man from woman and still remain a friend.
Life holds but three for her, a father, brother,
Lover—against the rest she must contend.
Against the universe I would protect you,
With my life even, nor hold the price too dear.
But not against yourself, should fate select you
As Lancelot for foolish Guinevere.
You would not tempt me?
That is undisputed.
We put the question back upon the shelf.
My point remains unanswered, unrefuted
No man protects a woman from himself.
I am immune: for once I loved with passion,
And all the fires within me burned to dust.
I think of woman but in friendly fashion:
In me she finds a comrade safe to trust.
So said Mount Peelée to the listening ocean:
Behold what followed! Let the good be wise.
Though human hearts proclaim extinct emotion,
Beware how high the tides of friendship rise.
SHOULD I long that dark were fair?
Dark the night, with breath all flow’rs,
Dark the night,
Say, O song,
Lacks my love aught, that I should long?
And tender broken voice that fills
With ravishment the listening hours:
Whisperings, wooings,
Liquid ripples and soft ring-dove cooings
In low-ton’d rhythm that love’s aching stills.
Yet is she bright,
For in her dark she brings the mystic star,
Trembling yet strong, as is the voice of love,
From some unknown afar.
O radiant Dark! O darkly-fostered ray!
Thou hast a joy too deep for shallow Day.
George Eliot
Songs from “The Spanish Gypsy.” I. The Dark
But it is possible, it is possible: the old grief, by a great mystery
I bless the sun's rising each day and my heart sings to
of human life, gradually passes into quiet, tender joy;
instead of young, ebullient blood comes a mild, serene old age:
it as before, but now I love its setting even more, its long
slanting rays, and with them quiet, mild, tender memories,
dear images from the whole of a long and blessed life--and
over all is God's truth, moving, reconciling, all-forgiving!
Fyodor Dostoevsky
the tenderness, all the love, that has been scattered through
the toilsome years, concentrating in one emotion of heroic
courage or resignation all the hard-learned lessons of
self-renouncing sympathy, blending your present joy
with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your past joy?
GEORGE ELIOT,Adam Bede
Take of the maiden's and the mother's sigh,
Of echoes from the morning bird on high,
Of childhood's dream, and hope that age doth bless,
Of roses and the south wind's tenderness,
Of fir-tree's shadow, tint of sunset sky,
Of moon on meadow where the stream runs by,
Of lover's kiss, his diffident caress,
Of blue eyes' yellow, brown eyes' darker, tress,
Of passion of all pulses of the Spring,
Of prayer from every death-bed of the Fall,
Of joy and woe that sleep and waking bring,
Of tremor of each blood-beat great and small;
Now, pour into the empty soul each thing,
And let His finger touch that moveth all.
Don’t worry about saving these songs!
We have fallen into the place
The strumming and the flute notes
So the candle flickers and goes out.
This singing art is sea foam.
Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge
They derive
Stop the words now.
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn’t matter.
where everything is music.
rise into the atmosphere,
and even if the whole world’s harp
should burn up, there will still be
hidden instruments playing.
We have a piece of flint, and a spark.
The graceful movements come from a pearl
somewhere on the ocean floor.
of driftwood along the beach, wanting!
from a slow and powerful root
that we can’t see.
Open the window in the center of your chest,
and let the spirit fly in and out.
I wish I could speak like music.
I wish I could put the swaying splendor
So that you could hold Truth
I am trying the best I can
To cover you with light.
I wish I could speak like divine music.
I want to give you the sublime rhythms
As they joyously spin and surrender,
Hafiz wants you to hold me
And dance,
Of the fields into words
Against your body
And dance.
With this crude brush, the tongue,
Of this earth and the sky’s limbs
Surrender
Against God’s luminous breath.
Against your precious
Body
Dance.
We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings
their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble
of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak
ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Don't be afraid of having a relationship with a strong woman.
There might come a day when she will be your only army.
Nizar Qabani
Walk with grief like a good friend.
Listen to what he says.
Sometimes the cold and dark of a cave
give the opening we most want.
Rumi
The essence of belief is doubt,
The essence of Time is Flow, not Fix.
The growing man is Man Alive, and his "philosophy"
The man too fixed today, unfixed tomorrow - and his body
the essence of reality is questioning.
The essence of faith is the knowledge that all flows
and that everything must change.
must grow, must flow, with him.
of beliefs is nothing but a series of fixations.
Thomas Wolfe
May you be for ever blessed
Isn't such a moment sufficient
for that moment of bliss and happiness
which you gave to another lonely and grateful heart.
for the whole of one's life?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
