Quotes About Introspection

Why should you want to exclude from your life all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit, when you don't know what work it is these states are performing within you?

For the creator must be a world for himself, and find everything within himself, and in Nature to which he has attached himself.

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.

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.

À travers nous s'envolent Les oiseaux en silence. O, moi qui veux grandir Je regarde au dehors, et l'arbre en moi grandit.

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.

I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has needed me. My looking ripens things ? Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place.

Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself.

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!

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

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?

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves...

Doch wie ich mich auch in mich selber neige: Mein Gott ist dunkel und wie ein Gewebe von hundert Wurzeln, welche schweigsam trinken.

to go into yourself and to examine the depths from which your life springs; at its source you will find the answer to the question

You are so young, all still lies ahead of you, and I should like to ask you, as best I can, dear Sir, to be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue.

Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.

Ich glaube, daß fast alle unsere Traurigkeiten Momente der Spannung sind, die wir als Lähmung empfinden, weil wir unsere befremdeten Gefühle nicht mehr leben hören. Weil wir mit dem Fremden, das bei uns eingetreten ist, allein sind, weil uns alles Vertraute und Gewohnte für einen Augenblick fortgenommen ist; weil wir mitten in einem Übergang stehen, wo wir nicht stehen bleiben können.

Mit deinen Augen, welche müde kaum von der verbrauchten Schwelle sich befrein, hebst du ganz langsam einen schwarzen Baum und stellst ihn vor den Himmel: schlank, allein. Und hast die Welt gemacht. Und sie ist groß und wie ein Wort, das noch im Schweigen reift. Und wie dein Wille ihren Sinn begreift, lassen sie deine Augen zärtlich los ...

Think, dear sir, of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking what you will; {...} only be attentive to that which rises up in you and set it above everything that you observe about you. What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love.

Maledizione antica dei poeti che invece di parlare si lamentano, che sempre giudicano il loro sentimento invece di formarlo; e si ostinano a pensare che quanto in loro è lieto o triste, spetti a loro deplorare o celebrare nella poesia.

I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them.

In the room...they are inside the books. They move sometimes within the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams.

ich kreise jahrtausendelang; und ich weiß noch nicht: bin ich ein Falke, ein Sturm