keep on the sunny side

When a flower doesn’t bloom you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.

Radiate boundless love towards the entire world — above, below, and across — unhindered, without ill will, without enmity.

If you see beauty in something, don’t wait for others to agree.

Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow.

I, too, remember that feeling. You are caught between all that was and all that must be. You feel lost.

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd; the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It’s the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.