A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, the longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home.

His way had therefore come full circle, or rather had taken the form of an ellipse or a spiral, following as ever no straight unbroken line, for the rectilinear belongs only to Geometry and not to Nature and Life.

Che cosa sia un uomo realmente vivo si sa oggi meno che mai, e perciò si ammazzano gli uomini in grande quantità, mentre ognuno di essi è un esperimento unico e prezioso della natura.

That is just what life is when it is beautiful and happy - a game! Naturally, one can also do all kinds of other things with it, make a duty of it, or a battleground, or a prison, but that does not make it any prettier...

Auf diesem Platz hat schon mancher gedacht, hier wäre der Ort für ein tüchtiges Stück Leben und Freude, hier müßte etwas Lebendiges, Beglückendes wachsen können, hier müßten reife und gute Menschen ihre freudigen Gedanken denken und schöne und heitere Werke schaffen.

Thoughts and sorrows seem to have remained on the other side of the mountains. Between tormented men and hateful deeds, a person has to think and sorrow so much! Back there it is so difficult and so desperately important to find a reason for staying alive. How else should a person go on living? Sheer misery makes one profound.

On one part of the footpath where a thin trickle of water from a small spring kept it damp, I found … a swarm of … small, blue butterflies drinking the water. … I only went that way on sunny days and each time the dense, blue swarm was there, and each time it was a holiday.

Even as a child I had had at intervals a fondness for observing strange forms in nature, not so much examining them as surrendering myself to their magic, their oblique message. Long tree-roots, coloured veins in rock, patches of oil floating on water, flaws in glass—all such things had a certain fascination for me, above all, water and fire, smoke, clouds, dust and expecially the swirling specks of colour which swam before my closed eyes.

The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.