Highlights from letters to a young poet

The best advice you'll ever get from a dead guy compiled in one blog post.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote these letters to a 19 year old aspiring writer from Feb 1903-Nov 1904. Here are my favorite quotes from this series of correspondences.

Letter of Feb. 17 1903

"Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple 'I must,' then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse."

"If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches."

"A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity."

Letter of April 5, 1903

"...for ultimately, and precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone..."

Letter of April 23, 1903

"Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism."

"Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentations, discussions, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights."

"(But that is one of the most difficult tests for the creator: he must always remain unconscious, unaware of his best virtues, if he doesn't want to rob them of their candor and innocence!)"

Letter of July 16, 1903

"You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language."

"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..."

"...love life in a form that is not your own..."

"Don't ask for any advice ... 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."

"But 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."

Letter of Dec. 23, 1903

"You... are bearing your solitude more heavily than usual. But when you notice that it is vast, you should be happy; for what (you should ask yourself) would a solitude be that was not vast; there is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear..."

"What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude."

"What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love."

May 14, 1904

"We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.

It is also good to love: because love is difficult. 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."

"But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their being,--then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us. That would be much."

"...this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other."

Aug. 12, 1904

"The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise..."

"If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, ad the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing."

"And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside."

"It is necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own."

"What we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us."

"We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life..."

"But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down on a fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens."

"We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them."

"Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you?"

"Don't observe yourself too closely. Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen."

"Don't think that the person who is trying to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes give you pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness, and remains far beyond yours. If it were otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words."

November 4, 1904

"All feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts you."

"Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right."

"Your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing..."