abeer > abeer's Quotes

“I beg you, 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, Letters to a Young Poet

“If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.
- Mitchell translation”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Don’t be confused by
surfaces; in the depths everything becomes law. And those who live the mystery
falsely and badly (and they are very many) lose it only for themselves and
nevertheless pass it on like a sealed letter, without knowing it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“perhaps the sexes are more akin than people think, and the great
renewal of the world will perhaps consist in one phenomenon: that man and
woman, freed from all mistaken feelings and aversions, will seek each other not as
opposites but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will unite as human beings,
in order to bear in common, simply, earnestly, and patiently, the heavy sex that
has been laid upon them.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I don’t like to
write letters while I am traveling, because for letter writing I need more than the
most necessary tools: some silence and solitude and a not too familiar hour.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“of all the disfigured and
decaying Things, which, after all, are essentially nothing more than accidental
remains from another time and from a life that is not and should not be ours.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Finally, after weeks of daily resistance, one finds oneself somewhat composed
again, even though still a bit confused, and one says to oneself: No, there is not
more beauty here than in other places, and all these objects, which have been
marveled at by generation after generation, mended and restored by the hands of
workmen, mean nothing, are nothing, and have no heart and no value; — but
there is much beauty here, because everywhere there is much beauty”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is some thing in you that wants to move out of it. This very wish, if you use it calmly and prudently and like a tool, will help you spread out your solitude over a great distance. Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything, in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.... Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances... Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“It is true that many young people who wrongly, that is, simply with abandon and unsolitarily, feel the oppressiveness of a failure and want to make the situation in which they have landed viable and fruitful in their own personal way—; for their nature tells them that, less even than all else that is important, can questions of love be solved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case demand a new, special, only personal answer—: but how should they, who have already flung themselves together and no longer mark off and distinguish themselves from each other, who therefore no longer possess anything of their own selves, be able to find a way out of themselves, out of the depth of their already shattered solitude?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“And to speak of solitude again, it becomes clearer and clearer that fundamentally this is nothing that one can choose or refrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. But how much better it is to recognize that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this realization. It will, of course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes used to rest on are taken away from us, there is no longer anything near us, and everything far away is infinitely far.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“If I could always find something to interest me the solution might be at hand, but with the same dreary prospect of day after day of hell, hell, hell (the other word for business to an artistic temperament), how can I get a night’s rest? I lie awake and go through all the hot passions, wild enthusiasms, ecstatic feelings, morbid thoughts, wrath at the existing order of things. I damn everything, and yet I realize how futile my scheme of life would be for others.”
― Wallace E. Baker, Diary of a Suicide

“How could you do it? You have made a terrible mistake—to make me such a shattered wreck before I was out of my youth; to take from me everything, strip me naked so that I can say now that I am absolutely indifferent to everything except to express myself before I die.”
― Wallace E. Baker, Diary of a Suicide

“It seems impossible that I should be born to get so near to some things which touch the deepest strings of human conduct, the deepest emotions of heart and brain, to have such a keen sense of humor, to see the tragedy underlying it all, to feel a sympathetic note with the foibles and weaknesses of others, even as I laugh at them or become cynical about them, to walk by the sea and drink in her varying moods, the misty ethereal early mornings, the calmness of gradually settling twilight on a day when the waves scarcely ripple, the blood-red sunsets with ever-changing cloud effects; the deep, mysterious shadows on a dark night, with the moon reflected from behind the clouds; the night when the moon is in her glory; the day when an overcast sky symbolizes my overcast soul”
― Wallace E. Baker, Diary of a Suicide

“I almost congratulate myself that I can at least laugh at my own foibles and enjoy the joke, just as I cannot help, cynically to a certain extent, pointing out others’ foolish earnestness over nothing. My sense of humor is indeed my saving grace.”
― Wallace E. Baker, Diary of a Suicide

“if my nature is wrong, it is better to be wrong and be myself than to be what I honestly believe to be wrong and please others.”
― Wallace E. Baker, Diary of a Suicide

“Things cannot go on as they have been doing. Circumstances will force me to sink or swim, either to rise from this slough and weakness or collapse utterly,”
― Wallace E. Baker, Diary of a Suicide

“The majority is always wrong, and the minority of supermen and degenerates—Zolas, Ibsens, etc.—must band together and overthrow the whole damn system which drives the best, the most sincere and honest to suicide or starvation.”
― Wallace E. Baker, Diary of a Suicide

“وكم سمعنا في ذلك الوقت السيدات
أنفسهن يستنكرن تصريحات قاسم أمين ومبادئه رغم إنها كانت في صالحهن؛ لأنها
كانت تظهرن في الثوب الحقيقي من عدم الكفاءة، وكان ذلك يجرح كبرياءهن، فكن
بذلك يذكرنني بالجواري عندما تعطي لهن ورقة العتق من الرق، إذ كن يبكين على حياة
العبودية والأسر …”
― هدى شعراوي, مذكرات هدى شعراوي

“أقل مراتب العلم ما تعلمه الانسان من الكتب والأساتذة، وأعظمها ما تعلمه من تجاربه الشخصية في الأشياء والناس”
― قاسم أمين

“Dry autumn leaves revolved in your soul.”
― Neruda, Pablo

“In your eyes the flames of twilight fought on.

And the leaves fell on the water of your soul.”
― Neruda, Pablo, Nuevas Odas Elementales