Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.
Rainer Maria RilkeSo it's back once more, back up the slope. Why do they always ruin my rope with their cuts? I felt so ready the other day, Had a real foretaste of eternity In my guts. Spoonfeeding me yet another sip from life's cup. I don't want it, won't take any more of it. Let me throw up. Life is medium rare and good, I see, And the world full of soup and bread, But it won't pass into the blood for me, Just goes to my head. It makes me ill, though others it feeds; Do see that I must deny it! For a thousand years from now at least I'm keeping a diet.
Rainer Maria RilkeThings 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 RilkeWhy should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.
Rainer Maria Rilke