Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.
—Rainier Maria Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet
Quotables: a bit from Rilke
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Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.
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My director at the Summer Arts Conservatory gave me this passage a few years ago written on the back of a napkin. I still think I have that napkin around, somewhere.
The quotation works for a young poet, actor, teacher, and so on. It gets right at the heart of things.