In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!
Rainer Maria RilkeSomeday 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 complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.
Rainer Maria RilkeBut because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Rainer Maria RilkeI want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
Rainer Maria RilkeThe 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.
Rainer Maria RilkeO trees of life, O when are you wintering?We are not unified. We have no instinctslike those of migratory birds. Useless, and late,we force ourselves, suddenly, onto the wind,and fall down to an indifferent lake.We realise flowering and fading together.And somewhere lions still roam. Never knowing,as long as they have their splendour, of any weakness.
Rainer Maria Rilke