Letters to a Young Poet (Penguin Classics)
for at bottom, and particularly in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise, let alone help, another, a great deal must come about, a great deal must come right, a whole constellation of things must concur for it to be possible at all.
Rainer Maria Maria Rilke • Letters to a Young Poet (Penguin Classics)
And your doubts can become a good quality if you school them. They must grow to be knowledgeable, they must learn to be critical. As soon as they begin to spoil something for you ask them why a thing is ugly, demand hard evidence, test them, and you will perhaps find them at a loss and short of an answer, or perhaps mutinous. But do not give in, re
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For he who creates must be a world of his own and find everything within himself and in the natural world that he has elected to follow.
Rainer Maria Maria Rilke • Letters to a Young Poet (Penguin Classics)
Allow your verdicts their own quiet untroubled development which like all progress must come from deep within and cannot be forced or accelerated. Everything must be carried to term before it is born. To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattaina
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What goes on in your innermost being is worth all your love, this is what you must work on however you can and not waste too much time and too much energy on clarifying your attitude to other people.
Rainer Maria Maria Rilke • Letters to a Young Poet (Penguin Classics)
And as to feelings: all feelings are pure that focus you and raise you up. An impure feeling is one that only comprises one side of your nature and so distorts you. Any thoughts that match up to your childhood are good. Everything that makes more of you than you have hitherto been in your best moments is right. Every heightening is good if it occur
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To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquillity, as if eternity lay before them.
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Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice.
Rainer Maria Maria Rilke • Letters to a Young Poet (Penguin Classics)
Of all my books there are only a few I cannot do without, and two are always among my effects, wherever I am. I have them with me here: the Bible, and the books of the great Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen.