“Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism : they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.”

—  Rainer Maria Rilke, book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter One (17 February 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

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Rainer Maria Rilke176
Austrian poet and writer 1875–1926

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