Letters to a young poet – Rainer Marie Rilke

There is no measuring by time there, a year there has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to reckon and count; to ripen like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without fear lest no summer might come after. – Rilke

I can not recommend this book any higher for everyone to read. It is a very simple read that won’t take very long at all. There is just so much depth in this book for someone who wants to have any personal growth.

I read one letter a day so I could take my time and really absorb what Rainer is saying. Each letter contains a wealth of knowledge from someone you can tell has spent a great amount of time in solitude and has learned the importance of it.

One of my favorite quotes is “I would like to beg you, dear sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and to try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange tongue. I wish we all could get to this point in our own lives. If we could become so comfortable in our own skin and have the self-confidence to create.