13 quotes
We cannot evade life's course, but we can school ourselves to be superior to fortune and also to look unflinchingly upon the most painful things.
Gertrude (1910)
I have never lost the feeling of contradiction that lies behind all knowledge.
Gertrude (1910)
At about the age of six or seven, I realized that of all the invisible powers the one I was destined to be most strongly affected and dominated by was music.
Gertrude (1910)
If what matters in a person's existence is to accept the inevitable consciously, to taste the good and bad to the full and to make for oneself a more individual, unaccidental and inward destiny alongside one's external fate, then my life has been neither empty nor worthless.
Gertrude (1910)
Passion is always a mystery and unaccountable, and unfortunately there is no doubt that life does not spare its purest children and often it is just the most deserving people who cannot help loving those that destroy them.
Gertrude (1910)
Be still, my heart, away with pain!
Though passion stirs again
In blood that now flows slowly
And leads to paths once known,
These paths you tread in vain
For youth has flown.
Gertrude (1910)
Man's life seems to me like a long, weary night that would be intolerable if there were not occasionally flashes of light, the sudden brightness of which is so comforting and wonderful, that the moments of their appearance cancel out and justify the years of darkness.
Gertrude (1910)
The south winds roars at night,
Curlews hasten in their flight,
The air is damp and warm.
Desire to sleep has vanished now,
Spring has arrived in the night
In the wake of a storm.
Gertrude (1910)
That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged — to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony.
Gertrude (1910)
I was given the freedom to discover my own inclination and talents, to fashion my inmost pleasures and sorrows myself and to regard the future not as an alien higher power but as the hope and product of my own strength.
Gertrude (1910)
Was that really love? I saw all these passionate people reel about and drift haphazardly as if driven by a storm, the man filled with desire today, satiated on the morrow, loving fiercely and discarding brutally, sure of no affection and happy in no love...
Gertrude (1910)
One can call these moments creative, because they seem to give a feeling of union with the creator, and while they last, one is sensible of everything being necessary, even what is seemingly fortuitous. It is what the mystics call union with God.
Gertrude (1910)
Young people have many pleasures and many sorrows, because they only have themselves to think of, so every wish and every notion assume importance; every pleasure is tasted to the full, but also every sorrow, and many who find that their wishes cannot be fulfilled, immediately put an end to their lives.
Gertrude (1910)