“Despite how open, peaceful, and loving you attempt to be, people can only meet you as deeply as they’ve met themselves.”

““When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That’s the message he is sending.””

““Sometimes people are beautiful. Not in looks. Not in what they say. Just in what they are.””

“I try more and more to be myself, caring relatively little whether people approve or disapprove.”

“In the graveyard of the sea there is nothing but eternity.”

“Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.”

“Nichts war, nichts wird sein; alles ist, alles hat Wesen und Gegenwart.“”

“If a poem hasn’t ripped apart your soul; you haven’t experienced poetry.”

“The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person—without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other.”

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”