Rilke’s words feel like quiet lanterns, they do not hurry the heart. He invites us inward, toward love, truth, and the slow becoming of a life. One of his most enduring invitations is this: “Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write.” His language reminds us that the deepest work is often unseen, it happens in the quiet chambers of the heart.

Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try and say what you see and feel and love and lose.

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.

Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any compliment and limit, but only of life and reality, the female human being.

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?

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up.

Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.

Destiny is only the dense residue of childhood.

Work of the eyes is done, now
go and do heart work. Turning Point

We live our lives, for ever taking leave.

Who has twisted us like this, so that no matter what we do we have the bearing of a man going away? As on the last hill that shows him all his valley, for the last time, he turns, stands still, and lingers, so we live, forever saying farewell.

We need, in love, to practice only this:
letting each other go. For holding on comes easily, we do not need to learn it.

Beauty is as close to terror as we can well endure.

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love, the more they give, the more they possess.

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