Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet Quotes

But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.

If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.

most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.

And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.

Why don't you think of [God] as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity... the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are.

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. ...live in the question.

I believe that that love remains strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life.

Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Read the lines as if they were unknown to you, and you will feel in your inmost self how very much they are yours.

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.

It is necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own.

And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way--and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.

Let your judgements have their own quiet, undisturbed development, which must, like all progress, come from deep within, and cannot in any way be pressed or hurried.

perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys

That is fundamentally the only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things that can befall us

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.