“...In a case like this, the thing is (in my own opinion) to draw back upon oneself, and not to strive after any other being, not to relate the suffering, occasioned by both, to the cause of the suffering (which lies so far outside) but to make it fruitful for oneself. If you transfer what goes on in your emotion into solitude and do not bring your vacillating and tremulous feeling into the dangerous proximity of magnetic forces, it will, through its inherent flexibility, assume of its own accord the position that is natural and necessary to it. In any case, it helps to remind oneself very often that over everything that exists there are laws which never fail to operate, which come rushing, rather, to manifest and prove themselves upon every stone and upon every feather we let fall.So all erring consists simply in the failure to recognize the natural laws to which we are subject in the given instance, and every solution begins with our alertness and concentration, which gently draw us into the chain of events and restore to our will its balancing counterweights..."―from letter to Emanuel von Bodman Westerwede bei Bremen (August 17, 1901)”

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About Rainer Maria Rilke

Austrian poet

Rainer Maria Rilke was an Austrian poet and major German-language writer. He is remembered for writing with a distinctive, highly expressive voice, and for work that critics have often read as marked by mysticism. His writing explores subjective experience and doubt, and it spans poetry, one novel, several volumes of correspondence, and a few early novellas. These pieces helped establish his reputation as a writer whose language is intimate, reflective, and inward-looking.

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Books by Rainer Maria Rilke

Letters to a young poet

2011

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Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge

2017

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Neue Gedichte

1998

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Stundenbuch

2009

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