Letters to a Young Poet (1984) (edit title/settings)

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• Mr. Kappus: Add a description of this character.
• Rainer Maria Rake
• Rainer Maria Rilke

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• “To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours -- this is what you must be able to attain.”

• “Because you can no longer believe in God, who appears in it everywhere, then ask yourself, dear Mr. Kappus, whether you have really lost God. Isn't it much truer to say that you have never yet possessed him?”

• “We must trust in what is difficult.”

• “For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us.”

• “But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment...”

• “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.”

• “The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadness, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on when it “happens” (that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will feel related and clos to it in our innermost being.”

• “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.”

• “If you trust in Nature, in what is simple in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.”

• “Let everything happen to you Beauty and terror Just keep going No feeling is final.”

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• That is the point, to live everything. Now you must live your problems. And perhaps gradually, without noticing it, you will live your way into the answer some distant day.

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• Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and nothing can reach them so little as criticism.

  Highlighted by 11 Kindle customers

• And when from this turning inwards, from this retreat into your own world verses come into being, then you will not think of asking anyone, whether they are good verses. Nor will you try to get journals interested in these works, for you will see in them your own loved and natural possession, a part and an expression of your life. A work of art is good, when it is born of necessity.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Rome

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

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Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Rainer Maria Rilke (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 831.912

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( R ) › Rilke, Rainer Maria
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Poetry › German
• Books › Literature & Fiction › World Literature › European
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Poetry › Criticism
• Books › Literature & Fiction › History & Criticism › Criticism & Theory
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Letters & Correspondence
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary