Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words.

All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you. everything that you can think in the face of your childhood is right. everything that makes more of you than you have been in your best hours is right. every heightening is good if it is in your whole blood, if it is not intoxication, not turbidity, but joy which one can see clear to the bottom.

love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over and uniting with another. It is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.

people have oriented all their solutions to their sadness toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold on to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it. we know little, but that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; knowing that that something is difficult, the more reason we have that we should do it.

i believe that all our sadness are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing. for this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there anymore — its already in our blood. And we do not learn what it was.