Rainer Maria Rilke

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing _x000D_ That is more than your own. _x000D_ Let it brush your cheeks _x000D_ As it divides and rejoins behind you. _x000D_ _x000D_ The trees you planted in childhood have grown _x000D_ Too heavy. You cannot bring them along. _x000D_ Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

Go on loving what is good, simple, and ordinary.

The flower bends when the wind wants it to, and you must become like that-that is, filled with deep #‎ trust .

When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.

Trees do not force their sap, nor does the flower push its bloom.

Bound by conventions, people tend to reach for what is easy. Here we must be unafraid of what is difficult. For all living beings in nature must unfold in their particular way and become themselves despite all opposition.

I never read anything concerning my work. I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is not directed to him, does not have to open and read.

For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences.

You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. ... But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you [that is, passed through you]. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.

If my devils are to leave me, I'm afraid my angels will take flight as well.

You are also the physician who must watch over yourself. But in the course of every illness there are many days in which the physician can do nothing but wait.

Whoever now makes himself bigger, freer and more human in his own existence, is doing his part toward peace, — as yet it must be worked at in an inward direction, not until a few have it all big and ready within them can it let itself be brought into the world.

And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things.

Joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness.

Truly to sing, that is a different breath.

One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.

Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.