You can't explain the unknown in terms of the incomprehensible.
Dying is strange and hard if it is not our death, but a death that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none within us.
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
the knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance.
To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.
Think. . . of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it.
The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.
though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
Not everything that is more difficult is more meritorious.
I was born in London and raised in Rome until I was 4. Then we went back to London, where I went to school.
Content in a way he’d rarely been before Mercy, he simply stroked her until she purred. It delighted him as it always did. “I made you purr. ” A lazy yawn. “I’m faking it.