Letters To a Young Poet
Letter Four (16 July 1903)
You are so young; you stand before beginnings. I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
– Rainer Maria Rilke (Translator: Stephen Mitchell)
