“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
from poem Go to the Limits of Your Longing.
Appears in movie Jojo Rabbit.
Variant: Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final
Source: Letters to a Young Poet
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
… live in the question.”
Source: Letters to a Young Poet
Source: Letters to a Young Poet
Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Context: People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Source: Letters to a Young Poet
As quoted in Sunbeams : A Book of Quotations (1990) by Sy Safransky, p. 42
Letter Four (16 July 1903)
Variant: 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. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. (Translation by Stephen Mitchell)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Context: Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Source: Duino Elegies
Letter Ten (26 December 1908)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Die nächste Flut verwischt den Weg im Watt,
und alles wird auf allen Seiten gleich;
die kleine Insel draußen aber hat
die Augen zu; verwirrend kreist der Deich<p>um ihre Wohner, die in einem Schlaf
geboren werden, drin sie viele Welten
verwechseln schweigend, denn sie reden selten,
und jeder Satz ist wie ein Epitaph
Die Insel I (The Island I) (as translated by Cliff Crego)
Neue Gedichte (New Poems) (1907)
Letter Eight (12 August 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Je weiter ich lebe, desto nötiger scheint es mir, auszuhalten, das ganze Diktat des Daseins bis zum Schluss nachzuschreiben; denn es möchte sein, dass erst der letzte Satz jenes kleine, vielleicht unscheinbare Wort enthält, durch welches alles mühsam Erlernte und Unbegriffene sich gegen einen herrlichen Sinn hinüberkehrt.
Letter to Ilse Erdmann, 21 December 1913, in Letters on Life, U. Baer, trans. (2007)
Rilke's Letters
“Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.”
Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Letter Four (16 July 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)