Rainer Maria Rilke

“For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, are they nameless and one with ourselves.”

“Then only can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”

“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks.”

“The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.”

“Truly, it is good to be alive — to know how the wind on the hills is.”

“What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude.”

“To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours — that is what you must be able to attain.”

“To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grown-ups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important.”

“Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn?”

“You are so young, so much before all beginning.”

“All companionship can consist only in the strengthening of two neighboring solitudes.”

“All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.”

“Everything that you can think in the face of your childhood is right.”

“Everything that lifts you up out of yourself, out of your usual ways, is right.”

“Every state of feeling, even the slightest, is creative.”

“Resolve to be always beginning — to be a beginner.”

“Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you.”

“Be — and yet know the great void where all things begin.”

“Silent friend of many distances, feel how your breath enlarges all of space.”