You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. ... But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you [that is, passed through you]. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.
Rainer Maria RilkeIn one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive, filling it with sublimity and exaltation.
Rainer Maria RilkeYet everything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin's bow, which draws one voice out of two separate strings.
Rainer Maria Rilkeonly someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.
Rainer Maria RilkeOnly the individual who is solitary is like a thing placed under profound laws, and when he goes out into the morning that is just beginning, or looks out into the evening that is full of happening, and if he feels what is going on there, then all status drops from him as from a dead man, though he stands in the midst of sheer life.
Rainer Maria Rilke