Letters to a Young Poet (Penguin Little Black Classics)
we shall gradually learn to recognize that what we call fate originates in ourselves, in humankind, and does not work on us from the outside. Only because so many people did not absorb their fates while they were inhabited by them, and did not make them a part of themselves, only because of this did they fail to recognize what emerged from them.
Rainer Maria Rilke • Letters to a Young Poet (Penguin Little Black Classics)
But difficult things are what we were set to do, almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.
Rainer Maria Rilke • Letters to a Young Poet (Penguin Little Black Classics)
And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and static moment when our future comes upon us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and accidental point when it happens to us as if from the outside. The quieter, the more patient and open we are in our sadness, the deeper
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Why should you want to exclude from your life all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit, when you don’t know what work it is these states are performing within you?
Rainer Maria Rilke • Letters to a Young Poet (Penguin Little Black Classics)
We have no reason to be mistrustful of our world, for it is not against us. If it holds terrors they are our terrors, if it has its abysses these abysses belong to us, if there are dangers then we must try to love them.
Rainer Maria Rilke • Letters to a Young Poet (Penguin Little Black Classics)
I believe that love remains so strong and powerful in your memory because it was your first deep experience of solitariness and the first inner work that you undertook on your life.
Rainer Maria Rilke • Letters to a Young Poet (Penguin Little Black Classics)
But there young people so often and so badly go wrong: in that they (who by nature have no patience) fling themselves at one another when love comes over them, scatter themselves just as they are in all their troubledness, disorder, confusion … But what can come of that? What is life supposed to do with this heap of half-broken things that they
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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 unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live as an
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There is nothing less apt to touch a work of art than critical words: all we end up with there is more or less felicitous misunderstandings.