Echoes

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, but love it.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.

Life will have terrible blows, horrible blows, unfair blows. It doesn't matter. And some people recover and others don't. There I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He thought that every mischance in life was an opportunity to behave well — an opportunity to learn something.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

If you're going through hell, keep going.

All beings tremble before violence. All fear death. All love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth!

Never despair.

By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try, the world is beyond the winning.

Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist.

I assert once again as a truth to which history as a whole bears witness that men may second their fortune, but cannot oppose it; that they may weave its warp, but cannot break it. Yet they should never give up, because there is always hope, though they know not the end and more towards it along roads which cross one another and as yet are unexplored; and since there is hope, they should not despair, no matter what fortune brings or in what travail they find themselves.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

I died as a mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose to animal, I died as animal and I was Man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?

While I breathe, I hope.

Forget the years, forget distinctions. Leap into the boundless and make it your home!

The only man who makes no mistakes is the man who never does anything.

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.

That though the radiance which was once so bright be now for ever taken from my sight, though nothing can bring back the hour of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; we will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Time is a river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by, and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.

All is ephemeral — fame and the famous as well.

The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.