Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,because the mass man will mock it right away.I praise what is truly alive,what longs to be burned to death.In the calm water of the love-nights,where you were begotten, where you have begotten,a strange feeling comes over you,when you see the silent candle burning.Now you are no longer caughtin the obsession with darkness,and a desire for higher love-makingsweeps you upward.Distance does not make you falter.Now, arriving in magic, flying,and finally, insane for the light,you are the butterfly and you are gone.And so long as you haven't experienced this: to die and so to grow,you are only a troubled gueston the dark earth.

I find myself thinking back to something I saw on the local news about a year ago. A teen football player had died in a car accident. The cameras showed all his friends after the funeral—these big hulking guys, all in tears, saying, “I loved him. We all loved him so much.” I started crying, too, and I wondered if these guys had told the football player they loved him while he was alive, or whether it was only with death that this strange word, love, could be used. I vowed then and there that I would never hesitate to speak up to the people I loved. They deserved to know they gave meaning to my life. They deserved to know I thought the world of them.

So now you must choose... Are you a child who has not yet become world-weary? Or are you a philosopher who will vow never to become so? To children, the world and everything in it is new, something that gives rise to astonishment. It is not like that for adults. Most adults accept the world as a matter of course. This is precisely where philosophers are a notable exception. A philosopher never gets quite used to the world. To him or her, the world continues to seem a bit unreasonable - bewildering, even enigmatic. Philosophers and small children thus have an important faculty in common. The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder…

I blame the Internet. Its inconsiderate inclusion of everything.Success is transparent and accessible, hanging down where it can tease but not touch us. We talk into these scratchy microphones and take extra photographs but I still feel like there are just SO MANY PEOPLE. Every day, 1,035.6 books are published; sixty-six million people update their status each morning. At night, aimlessly scrolling, I remind myself of elementary school murals. One person can make a difference! But the people asking me what I want to be when I grow up don't want me to make a poster anymore. They want me to fill out forms and hand them rectangular cards that say HELLO THIS IS WHAT I DO.

ليس في هذه الدنيا شيء يمكن أن يتلذذ به الانسان تلذُذاً مستمراً..فكل لذة مهما كانت عظيمة تتناقص تدريجياً عند تعاطيها.

But whatever the form in which love appears, the lesson it teaches us is the same. We can never assimilate, never become, the beloved object. Possession is never complete, it will elude us in the end, and if we persist in our attempts to impose ourselves we will drown like Narcissus in the reflection of our own selves. Yet if we can liberate ourselves from the desire to make the thing over in accordance with our own ideas, we open up a wonderful world of perception and understanding, and we can grasp dimly the majestic processes of human experience. Why should that come through the contemplation of lives so utterly unrelated to our own? Why love, if we can never possess?...

You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you're not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn't a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now.

After my mom died she ate my father up completely. She would have hated it. Every minute of his life since then has been marked by her absence, every action has lacked dimension because she is not there to measure against. And when I was young I didn't understand, but now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird. If I had to live on without you I know I could not do it. But I hope, I have this vision of you walking unencumbered, with your shining hair in the sun. I have not seen this with my eyes, but only with my imagination, that makes pictures, that always wanted to paint you, shining; but I hope that this vision will be true, anyway.

I never wanted a too die for house, or a too die for car. I always wanted a too die for life.If you were to die tomorrow would you feel like you did everything you wanted to? Loved everyone and meant it? Lived with honesty and integrity? Stood up for what you believed in? Did you work to live or did you live to work? Those that hurt you or upset you did you try to work it out? Did you still love them from a distance even if they hurt you so bad? If not work to change and make it right before it's too late.Remember the house, the car, the money and the material possessions you can't take with you when your gone. All you have is YOU and what YOU were about. Remember that.

الإنسان يجب أن يدق الباب .. فسوف يجد أحداً يفتح .. عن رغبة أو رهبة أو ضيق .. ولكن لابد أن ينفتح الباب .. ومن وراءه باب ثاني وثالث

At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously. ... That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.

Understand that by giving something a name, you own it. I find that by naming it, you give yourself a sense of purpose. Like wanting to become a doctor or lawyer or writer for instance, don’t hide in the shadows and wait for it to happen, because the chances of it spontaneously happening are next to none, trust me. You actually have to put yourself out there and commit to it by giving it a name. And you achieve this by simply saying, I WILL become a ‘this’ or ‘that’ or whatever it is that you want. Because you see, if you own it, nothing anyone can say or do will be able to take it away from you; because YOU gave it a name and thus, it belongs to you.

Aren't you, like me, hoping that some person, thing, or event will come along to give you that final feeling of inner well-being you desire? Don't you often hope: 'May this book, idea, course, trip, job, country or relationship fulfill my deepest desire.' But as long as you are waiting for that mysterious moment you will go on running helter-skelter, always anxious and restless, always lustful and angry, never fully satisfied. You know that this is the compulsiveness that keeps us going and busy, but at the same time makes us wonder whether we are getting anywhere in the long run. This is the way to spiritual exhaustion and burn-out. This is the way to spiritual death.

There it was before her - life. Life: she thought but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.

نحن منهكون حين نفكر في المستقبل و ننسى ان نعيش اليوم .و مهملون حين نعيش اليوم و ننسى المستقبلو ما بين الاثنين نصنع حضارة.