“Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out … and perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.”

“As my mom has said, when one person is unhappy, it usually means two people are unhappy but that one has not come to terms with it yet.”

“People understand the meaning of eating lies in the nourishment of the body only when they cease to consider that the object of that activity is pleasure. …People understand the meaning of art only when they cease to consider that the aim of that activity is beauty, i. e., pleasure.”

“Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.”

“The desire to possess, the thirst for and the hankering after pleasure or the means thereof, preceded by a remembrance of the pleasure in one has who has enjoyed it, is attachment.”

“The farmer has patience and trusts the process. He just has the faith and deep understanding that through his daily efforts, the harvest will come. And then one day, almost out of nowhere, it does.”

“Alms in secret extinguish the wrath of the Lord means you are so immersed in sincerity and in preserving that sincerity that you have no pleasure in giving alms.”

“It is because human needs are contradictory that no human life can be perfect. That does not mean that human life is imperfect. It means that the idea of perfection has no meaning.”

“He has no equal in medieval German lyric poetry and perhaps not even in European lyric poetry of the Middle Ages.”

“Others may know pleasure, but pleasure is not happiness. It has no more importance than a shadow following a man.”