Woetoe’s Reviews > Witness to the Fire: Creativity and the Veil of Addiction > Status Update

Dostoevsky: “Without suffering, happiness cannot be understood. The ideal passes through suffering like gold through fire. The heavenly kingdom is attained through effort.”

Mechtild of Magdeburg: “From suffering I’ve learned this: That whoever is sore wounded by love will never he made whole unless she embrace the very same love which wounded her.”

Rilke: “Who talks of victory; to endure is all.”

‘The creative work always falls short of the vision, the immensity of which it never can fully express. Then, too, there is the paradox of faith and doubt in every creative process. To create one must hold one’s faith that one can create, that one will be spoken to and receive the inspiration. Yet, one must live with the doubt that one might be wrong, which counters inflation, grandiosity and fanaticism.’

‘The act of creation is a paradox. To create one must have the courage to stand in the tension of the opposites. To create one must be alone and set aside a sacred time and space to listen to the deeper Self; one must have a certain distance to have perspective. But one must also be involved with others.’

‘We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are ours; has it abysses, those belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.’ — Rilke

‘I feel like a small battlefield, in which the problems of our time are being fought out. All one can hope to do is to keep oneself humbly available, to allow oneself to be a battlefield. After all, the problems must be accomodated, have somewhere to struggle and come to rest and we, poor little humans, must put our inner space at their service and not run away.’

- Etty Hillesum

‘… The heavenly powers
Cannot do all things. It is the mortals
Who reach sooner into the abyss. So the turn is
With these. Long is
The time, but the true comes into
Its own.’
- Hölderin