A Girl Ponders Rilke

Rilke and friends mash up

1. To die would be an awfully big adventure
2.  But to die one would lose a life of love
3. Young people
4. are not yet capable of love
5. I love you without knowing how. 
6. I love you simply, without problems or pride.
7. Always trust yourself and your own feeling
8. Criticism is only self-doubt
9.  So am I to trust my doubt?
10. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt
11. doubt can become a good quality
12. doubt can turn into criticism
13. People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise. 
14.  And yet criticism is mostly bad
15. Patience is everything
16.  Creativity does not come through patience
17.  If you trust in Nature
18. your Solitude will be a support and home for you
19. but in solitude I am alone
20. we are solitary
21. One can acquire everything in solitude except character 
22. One cannot find patience in nature
23. How strange that Nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude
24. Indeed
25. Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience
26. and the pace of my life will flow with it.
27. If I find peace and patience,
28. my self-doubt with disappear,
29. my criticism will be of help,
30. Love will find me,
31. I will find me in solitude for
32. the monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.
33. And
34. The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. 

1. J.M. Barre

3. R.M. Rilke Letters to a Young Poet (68)

4. R.M. Rilke Letters to a Young Poet (68)

5. Pablo Neruda

6. Pablo Neruda

7. R.M. Rilke Letters to a Young Poet (23)

10. Sylvia Plath

11. R.M. Rilke Letters to a Young Poet (102)

13. W. Somerset Maugham

15. R.M. Rilke  Letters to a Young Poet (25)

17. R.M. Rilke Letters to a Young Poet (33)

18. R.M. Rilke Letters to a Young Poet (44)

20. R.M. Rilke Letters to a Young Poet (87)

21. Stendhal

23. Emily Dickinson

25. Ralph Waldo Emerson

32. Albert Einstein

34. Ralph Waldo Emerson

This project took many days of compiling quotes and researching many interesting people and seeing what they had to say on some of Rilke's more interesting quotes. One of the hardest parts for this assignment was the way I would put these quotes together to make one continuous coherent 'chapter'. But now that it is over with, I find that I should have spent more time making these lines flow better. I especially like the ending where I try to tie everything I had talked about previously into one nice, clean ending. I ended with an Emerson quote because I feel that Rilke is a transcendentalist in disguise. He always talked about nature and solitude...Transcendentalist ideas...So all in all, I could have done better, but I am happy with what I have achieved in one week of work. 

And now an inspirational...quote?