Rilke has recently become one of my new favorite muses. :) A 19th century poet, wise beyond his years…he was just 27 years old when he wrote the first letter of the series. I’m currently on my second trip through this book. Below are a few of my favorite quotes from his writings…
“Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside.”
” ‘Living and writing in heat.’ — And in fact artistic experience lies so incredibly close to that of sex, to its pain and its ecstacy, that the two manifestations are indeed but different forms of one and the same yearning and delight.”
“(…) it was of the sort that one reads again, when one finds them among one’s correspondence, and I recognized you in it as though you had been close at hand.
“(…) no human being anywhere can answer for you those questions and feelings that deep within them have a life of their own.”
“(…) to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you (…)”
“(…) love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.”
“(…) your distance is already among the stars and very large; rejoice in your growth, in which you naturally can take no one with you, and be kind to those who remain behind, and be sure and calm before them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with your confidence or joy, which they could not understand.”
“There I shall live all winter and rejoice in the great quiet (…)”
“What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love (…)”
“(…) they, who are long gone, are in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our destiny, as blood that pulsates, and as gesture that rises up out of the depths of time.”
“Read the lines as though they were someone else’s, and you will feel deep within you how much they are your own.”
“love (…) the last test and proof, the work for which other work is but preparation.”
“(…) to become world for himself for another’s sake”
— Off to Nashville, TBC :) xo
