I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are 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 you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

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

Saved by lili and

RelatedCollectionsNotes

Alice Walker writes in her 1972 poem “Reassurance,” “I must love the questions / themselves / as [the poet] Rilke said / like locked rooms / full of treasure / to which my blind / and groping key / does not yet fit.”

Jane McGonigal • Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything—Even Things That Seem Impossible Today

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 you wi... See more

A letter from the guy asking all the questions

It doesn’t matter if answers aren’t immediately forthcoming; the point, in Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous phrase, is to ‘live the questions’.

Oliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks

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

Krista Tippett • Becoming Wise Deluxe

In a 1903 letter to his protégé, the 19-year-old cadet and budding poet Franz Xaver Kappus, Rilke writes:

I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now