Echoes

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. Start sniffing the air, or glancing at the Trend Machine, and you are as good as dead, although you may make a nice living.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

I felt before I thought: this is the common lot of humanity.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.

Our sadness is not sad, but our cheap joys.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.

It is himself he is approaching, no other; and he should begin by turning resolutely away from all devices that are popularly believed to indicate style — all mannerisms, tricks, adornments.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

After the dazzle of day is gone, only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars; after the plain of the surface and the breakers have gone, the depths of the ocean show beautiful forms.

There is not love of life without despair about life.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.

You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more — more unseen forms become manifest to him.

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

What speaks to the soul escapes our measurements.

The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love.