Letters to a Young Poet
Art too is only a way of living, and one can prepare for it, living somehow, without knowing it; in everything real one is a closer, nearer neighbour to it than in the unreal semi-artistic professions which, while they make show of a relatedness to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art, as for instance the whole of journalism do
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And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become aware, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will perhaps find it helpless and nonplussed, perhaps also aggressive. But do not give way, demand arguments and conduct yourse
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Believe me: life is right, at all events. And about feelings:
Rainer Maria Rilke • Letters to a Young Poet
men bear only with difficulty, whose weight bows down the aged? Do you believe that one who really has him could lose him like a little stone, or do you not also feel that one who
Rainer Maria Rilke • Letters to a Young Poet
only pay attention to what arises within you, and set it above everything that you notice about you.
Rainer Maria Rilke • Letters to a Young Poet
Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them.
Rainer Maria Rilke • Letters to a Young Poet
There is no measuring by time there, a year there has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to reckon and count; to ripen like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of Spring without fear lest no Summer might come after. It does come. But it comes only to the patient ones, who are there
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your dreams and the objects of your memory. If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it;