Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Rainer Maria Rilke

Quote by Rainer Maria Rilke

“You are so young; you stand before beginnings. I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”

Quote by Rainer Maria Rilke

Work

Letters to a Young Poet

This book is a compilation of personal correspondence between a famous poet and a young individual seeking advice on poetry and the creative process. The letters delve into the complexities of artistic expression, the challenges of living as a poet, and the importance of self-discovery and authenticity in one's work. more

Author

Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke

German poet known for his profound poetry and epistolary works. Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry style is unique, often exploring themes such as loneliness, love, and religious faith. more

You May Also Like

“Life = a series of complex, inscrutable, events, relationships, that in turns, bring joy and grief. The only way to deal with Life when it becomes challenging is to flow with it, with graceful acceptance. Accept that there are and there will be imperfections. Deal with them, with faith, with patience, to the best of your abilities…and keep flowing…gracefully accepting what is and working calmly on what can be…”

“A man whose wife has done everything he wishes for twenty years can never understand why she so suddenly changes. The woman who for twenty years has been silent, forgiving, smiling, patient, becomes in his eyes a rebel when in the twenty-first year she loses her patience and argues, accuses, demands explanations.Then she is a mutineer against whom every stratagem is permissible. Twenty years of patience have only given her the right to be patient also in the twenty-first.”

“For this reason we should not try, through contempt or arrogant zeal, to attain this kind of contemplative knowledge prematurely; rather we should practice the commandments of Christ in due order and proceed undistracted through the various stages of contemplation previously discussed. Once we have purified the soul through patient endurance and with tears of fear and inward grief, and have reached the state of seeing the true nature of things, then - initiated spiritually by the angels - the intellect spontaneously attains this contemplative knowledge. But if a person is presumptuous and tries to reach the second stage before having reached the first, then not only will he fail to conform to God's purpose, but he will provoke many battles against himself, particularly through speculating about the nature of man, as we have learnt in the case of Adam. Those still subject to the passions gain nothing by attempting to act or think as if they were dispassionate: solid food is not good for babies, even though it is excellent for the mature (cf. Heb. 5:14). Rather they should exercise discrimination, yearning to act and think like the dispassionate, but holding back, as being unworthy. Yet when grace comes they should not reject it out of despair or laziness, neither should they presumptuously demand something prematurely, lest by seeking what has its proper time before that time has come, as St John Klimakos says, they fail to attain it in its proper time, and fall into delusion, perhaps beyond the help of man or the Scriptures.”

“I've learned that patience is something you don't "have"; you must create it yourself. It isn't a commodity doled out to all infants in varying amounts at birth. You learn (and earn) patience by making time for it, calming yourself down, relaxing, and letting it happen. The more you practice patience, the more you have. And the more you have, the easier it is to summon when you need it most.”