“What happens to the drop of wineThat you pour into the sea?Does it remain itself, unchanged?It is as if it never existed.So it is with the soul: Love drinks it in,It is united with Truth,Its old nature fades away,It is no longer master of itself.The soul wills and yet does not will:Its will belongs to Another.It has eyes only for this beauty;It no longer seeks to possess, as was its wont--It lacks the strength to possess such sweetness.The base of this highest of peaksIs founded on nichil,Shaped nothingness, made one with the Lord.”

“O Love, divine Love, why do You lay siege to me?In a frenzy of love for me, You find no rest.From five sides You move against me,Hearing, sight, taste, touch, and scent.To come out is to be caught; I cannot hide from You.If I come out through sight I see LovePainted in every form and color,Inviting me to come to You, to dwell in You.If I leave through the door of hearing,What I hear points only to You, Lord;I cannot escape Love through this gage.If I come out through taste, every flavor proclaims:"Love, divine Love, hungering Love!You have caught me on Your hook, for you want to reign in me."If I leave through the door of scentI sense You in all creation; You have caught meAnd wounded me through that fragrance.If I come out through the sense of touchI find Your lineaments in every creature;To try to flee from You is madness.Love, I flee from You, afraid to give You my heart:I see that You make me one with You,I cease to be me and can no longer find myself.If I see evil in a man or defect or temptation,You fuse me with him, and make me suffer;O Love without limits, who is it You love?It is You, O Crucified Christ,Who take possession of me,Drawing me out of the sea to the shore;There I suffer to see Your wounded heart.Why did You endure the pain?So that I might be healed.”

“While human ingenuity may devise various inventions to the same ends, it will never devise anything more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than nature does, because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.”

“To me it seems that those sciences are vain and full of error which are not born of experience, mother of all certainty, first-hand experience which in its origins, or means, or end has passed through one of the five senses. And if we doubt the certainty of everything which passes through the senses, how much more ought we to doubt things contrary to these senses – ribelli ad essi sensi – such as the existence of God or of the soul or similar things over which there is always dispute and contention. And in fact it happens that whenever reason is wanting men to cry out against one another, which does not happen with certainties. For this reason we shall say that where the cry of controversy is heard, there is no true science, because the truth has one single end and when this is published, argument is destroyed for ever.”

“We have possessed virtually nothing in our life in Italy. In England, I became increasingly sure that to possess something was to arrest your knowledge of it, because the thing itself is no longer free. For me the pain of knowledge is a tonic, an antidote to the pall of possession. But there is an element of death in knowledge (...) Knowledge is what remains to the human mind once the possession has been lost. It is the reliquary of the vanished object. Its presence is painful, because it signifies that what was known is no longer there.”

“How may paintings have preserved the image of a divine beauty which in its natural manifestation has been rapidly overtaken by time or death. Thus, the work of the painter is nobler than that of nature, its mistress.”

“He is a poor pupil who does not go beyond his master.”