bigBADbobby.blogspot.com: rilke

Thursday, May 19, 2011

In the words of Rainer Maria Rilke...

Quotes that I cut from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke:

"If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, 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."

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"I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue."

"To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps he most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn love."

"This humanity of woman, borne its full time in suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she will have stripped off the conventions of mere femininity in the mutations of her outward status, and those men who do not feel it approaching today will be surprised and struck by it... This advance will change the love-experience, which is now in full error, will alter it from the ground up, reshape it into a relation that is meant to be of one human being to another, no longer of man to woman And this more human love will resemble that which we are preparing with struggle and toil, the love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other."

"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 makes more of you than you have heretofore been in your best hours, is right. Every heightening is good if it is in your whole blood, if it is not intoxication, not turbidity, but joy which one can see clear to the bottom… And your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perplexed and embarrassed perhaps, or perhaps rebellious. But don’t give in, insist on arguments and act this way, watchful and consistent, every single time, and the day will arrive when from a destroyer it will become one of your best workers—perhaps the cleverest of all that are building at your life."

Thursday, May 19, 2011

In the words of Rainer Maria Rilke...

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Books 29, 30, 31 of 64