All feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts yo… - Rainer Maria Rilke

The demands which the difficult work of love makes upon our development are more than life-size, and as beginners we are not up to them. But if we nevertheless hold out and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in all the light and frivolous play, behind which people have hidden from the most earnest earnestness of their existence — then a little progress and alleviation will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us; that would be much.

Lovers ... when you raise yourselves and press your mouths together—drink upon drink: strange how each of you drinks your way past the other.

He [Cézanne] reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog.