From Rilke's Letter on Love

Rainer Maria Rilke

from Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties

translated from German by John J. L. Mood

I tell you that I have a long way to go before I am-where one begins. . . .

You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Resolve to be always beginning-to be a beginner!