Most experiences are unsayable; they become real to us in a space no word has entered.

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet (tr. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

i exist, i exist, i exist

@ryebreadgf // holly warburton // ? // image from pinterest // letters to a young poet by rainer maria rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke Letters to a Young Poet / @dungeonsanddragonsfifthedition / Mary Oliver Wild Geese / @berecovered / pinterest / pinterest / K.C Cramm tender is not a bad word

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

--- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

...your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.

Letters to a Young Poet | Rainer Maria Rilke

"letters to a young poet" by rainer maria rilke.

“Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

How could we forget the myths about dragons who at the last moment transform into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses waiting to see us act just once with courage.

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet (tr. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet. The Third Letter, Viareggio, near Pisa (Italy). April 23, 1903

“Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

So you mustn’t be frightened, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person—it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distance. Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distance exists, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of seeing each other as a whole before an immense sky.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

"Think, dear sir, of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking what you will; whether it be remembering your own childhood or yearning toward your own future--only be attentive to that which rises up in you and set it above everything that you observe about you. What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love."

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, December 23rd, 1906

Celle que vous croyez (2019) by Safy Nebbou

Book title: Lettres à un jeune poète (Briefe an einen jungen Dichter in German; 1929) by Rainer Maria Rilke