There are lots of things we never understand, no matter how many years we put on, no matter how much experience we accumulate.
The hero is strangely akin to those who die young.
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.
A child, when it begins to speak, learns what it is that it knows.
Creation of something out of nothing is the most primitive of human passions and the most optimistic
It hasn't always easy to combine these two competing ambitions and, in retrospect, it's a shame no one steered me towards science communications, which I think would have suited me down to the ground. But careers advice has largely been absent from my life, so I have pretty much made it up as I've gone along!
We were broke in a way that only kids can be broke. Our toes were black with dye from wearing boots that weren't waterproof. We had infected ear lobes and green rings around our fingers from cheap jewelry. No one ever even had a chocolate bar.