Maria Popova • Live the Questions: Rilke on Embracing Uncertainty and Doubt as a Stabilizing Force

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps

Love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even

Rainer Maria Rilke said this most eloquently in Letters to a Young Poet, which he wrote in 1929 to encourage a nineteen-year old writer: I would like to beg you, dear sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very fo

Rainer Maria Rilke describes this gracefully: Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

“What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think to ask.” —Sam Keen