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"There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, "I must, then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge."
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Explore more quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke
"Even when the lights go out, even when someone says to me: "It's over---," even when from the stage a gray gust of emptiness drifts toward me,even when not one silent ancestor sits beside me anymore---not a woman, not even the boy with the brown squint-eye:I'll sit here anyway. One can always watch."
"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; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of."
"And these thingsthat keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient,they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue.They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts,into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be."
"You, yesterday's boy,to whom confusion came:Listen, lest you forget who you are.It was not pleasure you fell into. It was joy.You were called to be bridegroom,though the bride coming toward you is your shame.What chose you is the great desire.Now all flesh bares itself to you.On pious images pale cheeksblush with a strange fire.Your senses uncoil like snakesawakened by the beat of the tambourine.Then suddenly you're left all alonewith your body that can't love youand your will that can't save you.But now, like a whispering in dark streets,rumors of God run through your dark blood."
"We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most intimate. From images that are full, the spirit plunges on to others that suddenly must be filled; there are no lakes till eternity. Here, falling is best. To fall from the mastered emotion into the guessed-at, and onward."
"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
"Oh longing for places that were not Cherished enough in that fleeting hour How I long to make good from afar The forgotten gesture the additional act."
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