Rainer Maria Rilke

To be an artist... means to ripen as the tree, which does not force its sap, but stands unshaken in the storms of spring with no fear that summer might not follow...

"You, sent out beyond your recall... go to the limits of your longing. "

"Flare up like flame and make big shadows. "

"Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror."

"Just keep going. No feeling is final."

How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the strongest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.  

If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.  

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.  

Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn't force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come

Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, no feeling is final.

"And we: spectators, always, everywhere, looking at everything, and never from!...Who's turned us around like this, so that whatever we do, we always have the look of someone going away? Just as a man on the last hill showing him his whole valley one last time, turns, and stops, and lingers -so we live, and are forever leaving.

All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.

No, we don't accomplish our love in a single year
as the flowers do; an immemorial sap
flows up through our arms when we love. Dear girl,
this: that we loved, inside us, not One who would someday appear, but
seething multitudes; not just a single child,
but also the fathers lying in our depths
like fallen mountains; also the dried-up riverbeds
of ancient mothers-;also the whole
soundless landscape under the clouded or clear
sky of its destiny -; all this, my dear, preceded you.

Again, Again!

Again, again, even if we know the countryside of love,
And the tiny churchyard with its names mourning,
And the chasm, more and more silent, terrifying, into which the others
Dropped: we walk out together anyway
Beneath the ancient trees, we lie down again,
Again, among the flowers, and face the sky.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

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.