(Not sure why I am reading Rilke in translation when I could read him in the original, but I couldn't resist this beautiful edition.)
"If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon up its riches; for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place." (p.8)
"[M]ost events are unsayable, occur in a space that no word has ever penetrated, and most unsayable of all are works of art, mysterious existences whose life endures alongside ours, which passes away" (p.6)
"Physical desire [...] is a great and endless feeling which is granted to us, a way of knowing the world, the fullness and the splendour of all knowledge." (p.24)
"What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness [...] Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child [...] Why wish to exchange a child's wise incomprehension for rejection and contempt, when incomprehension is solitude, whereas rejection and contempt are ways of participating in what, by precisely these means, you want to sever yourself from?" (pp.34f.)
Rilke, Rainer Maria: Letters to a Young Poet, Penguin Classics, London 2011
"If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon up its riches; for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place." (p.8)
"[M]ost events are unsayable, occur in a space that no word has ever penetrated, and most unsayable of all are works of art, mysterious existences whose life endures alongside ours, which passes away" (p.6)
"Physical desire [...] is a great and endless feeling which is granted to us, a way of knowing the world, the fullness and the splendour of all knowledge." (p.24)
"What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness [...] Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child [...] Why wish to exchange a child's wise incomprehension for rejection and contempt, when incomprehension is solitude, whereas rejection and contempt are ways of participating in what, by precisely these means, you want to sever yourself from?" (pp.34f.)
Rilke, Rainer Maria: Letters to a Young Poet, Penguin Classics, London 2011
RSS Feed
