A friend of mine sent me this quote yesterday — wont say why (grin). It’s from ‘Letters to a Young Poet’ by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Rainer Maria Rilke (4 December, 1875 — 29 December, 1926) is generally considered the German language’s greatest 20th century poet.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now 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.

On wikiquote.org I also found this variation:

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. (as translated by Stephen Mitchell)

I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself
and to explore the depths where your life wells forth.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926) is generally considered the German language’s greatest 20th century poet. His haunting images tend to focus on the problems of Christianity in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety, themes that sometimes place him in the school of modernist poets.