"I went away conscious that I had seen not only a genius-of ideas, but also a character of the most genuine sublimity . . I felt myself . . . transported into a new existence. Francis of Assisi and the other heroes of asceticism had become my ideals."

“The inability to resign oneself to the necessary order, is also a necessity and the pain is on that account no less!”

“What in all the world has courage to do with hope?”

“, willing what it does not will and not willing what it wills.”

“And if my friends refused to listen to me, then the walls had to hear me or the stones in the fields and the trees of the forests.”

“no asylum for lawless vagabonds , no free playground granted by the master of the world in his good humor to each of these kobolds, where they might have the privilege of moving about and of enjoying themselves in a manner unrelated to the rational worldpurpose-until their day also came and the broomstick of the courtmaster would sweep them out into the sanctum.”

“The longer I live, the more I feel that the simplest formula for the constancy of my fate is: on a lost watch.”