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Quotes About Self-discovery

This, above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write? Delve deep into yourself. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this question witha strong and simple 'I must' then build your lfie according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
But to be what I am, to live what I was meant to live, to want to sound like no one else, to yield the blossoms dictated to my heart: this is what I want - and this surely cannot be arrogance. (Letters on Life)
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Take your practiced powers and stretch them out until they span the chasm between contradictions ... for the god wants to know himself in you.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
It is true that many young people who do not love rightly, who simply surrender themselves and leave no room for aloneness, experience the depressing feeling of failure.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
It is necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Isn't it time that, in love, we freed ourselves from the loved one and, trembling, endured: as the arrow endures the string, collecting itself to be more than itself as it shoots?
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it becomes clear that most people get to know only one corner of their room, a window seat, a strip of floor which they pace up and down.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Kendi içine yürümek ve saatler boyu kimselere rastlamamak. İşte eriÅŸilmesi gereken ÅŸey bizler için
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
There exists only one aloneness, and it is great, and it is not easy to bear. To nearly everyone come those hours that we would gladly exchange for any cheap or even the most banal camaraderie, for even the slightest inclination to choose the second-best or the most unworthy thing. But perhaps it is exactly in those hours when aloneness can flourish.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Think, dear Sir, of the world that you carry inside you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own — only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it, and not lose too much time or too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you. This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
I would finally just like to advise you to grow through your development quietly and seriously; you can interrupt it in no more violent manner than by looking outwards, and expecting answer from outside to questions which perhaps only your innermost feeling in your most silent hour can answer.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
If one think he can live without writing, perhaps he should not write at all.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
particularly in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
For the creator must be a world for himself, and find everything within himself, and in Nature to which he has attached himself.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
There is but one solitude, and that is great and not easy to bear, and to almost everybody come hours when they would gladly exchange it for any sort of intercourse, however banal and cheap, for the semblance of some slight accord with the first comer, with the unworthiest... But perhaps those are the very hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of springtimes.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
C'est pourtant nous qui t'avons proposé de remplir ton calice. Enchantée de cet artifice, ton abondance l'avait osé. Tu étais assez riche, pour devenir cent fois toi-même en une seule fleur; c'est l'état de celui qui aime ... Mais tu n'as pas pensé ailleurs.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you. (Letters on Life)
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
So whoever loves must try to act as if he had a great work: he must be much alone and go into himself and collect himself and hold fast to himself; he must work; he must become something!
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you — no one
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to write; check whether it reaches its roots into the deepest region of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied you to write. This above all: ask yourself in your night's quietest hour: must I write?
~ Rainer Maria Rilke