No area of human existence is so burdened with conventions as love between two people. There are life-preservers of the most varied invention, life-boats and safety vests; society has fashioned rescue strategies of every description. Since it has chosen to take love as an easy pleasure, it must make it as cheap and as safe as all public amusements should be.

— Rilke, Rome, May 14, 1904
Letters to a Young Poet

I’m too alone in the world, yet not alone enough
to make each hour holy.
I’m too small in the world, yet not small enough
to be simply in your presence, like a thing —
just as it is.

— Rilke, From The Book of Hours I, 13

Dance like it hurts. Love like you need money. Work when people are watching.

— Dogbert’s motto

I still wonder about the subtle distinction between “marketing” and fraud.

— Scott Adams

It feels as though I make my own way
through massive rock
like a vein of ore
alone, encased.

I am so deep inside it
I can’t see the path or any distance:
everything is close
and everything closing in on me
has turned to stone.

Since I still don’t know enough about pain,
this terrible darkness makes me small.
If it’s you, though —

press down hard on me, break in
that I may know the weight of your hand
and you, the fullness of my cry.

— Rilke, The Book of Hours III, 1

I envy the beasts two things —
their ignorance of evil to come,
and their ignorance of what is
said about them.

— Voltaire

I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men,
that God might manifest them, and that they might see that
they themselves are beasts.

For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts;
even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other;
yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence
above a beast: for all is vanity.

All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.

Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?

— Ecclesiastes III, 18-21

His asylum at Vigny-sur-Seine was always full. It was called a “Rest Home” in the prospectuses, because it was in the middle of a big garden, where the nuts went walking on nice days. They walked as if they had trouble keeping their heads balanced on their shoulders, they seemed in constant fear of stumbling and spilling the contents. All sorts of misshapen things, things they were dreadfully attached to, were bobbing and bumping about in there.

When the patients spoke of their mental treasures, it was always with anguished contortions or airs of protective condescension that made you think of powerful and ultrameticulous executives. Not for an empire would those lunatics have gone outside their minds. A madman’s thoughts are just the usual ideas of a human being, except that they’re hermetically sealed inside his head. The world never gets into his head, and that’s the way he wants it. A sealed head is like a lake without an outlet, standing, stagnant.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

Do not measure in terms of time: one year or ten years means nothing. For the artist there is no counting or tallying up; just ripening like the tree that does not force its sap and endures the storms of spring without fearing that summer will not come. But it will come. It comes, however, only to the patient ones who stand there as if all eternity lay before them — vast, still, untroubled. I learn this every day of my life, I learn it from hardships I am grateful for: patience is all.

— Rilke, Viareggio, April 23, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet

We, though we yearn for the One,
already feel the pull of other things.
Are not lovers ever pushing
at each other’s limits? Lovers,
who promised each other
vastness, hunt, and home. . . .

— Rilke, From the Fourth Duino Elegy

The shapeless heaps turn out to be beggars.
They reveal themselves as you pass by.
They are selling the nothing
their hands hold out.

— Rilke, New Poems

All feelings that gather you up and lift you are pure. If they twist and tear at your being, they are not. All tenderness you may feel for your childhood is good. Every emotion that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is good. Every intensification is good, if it seizes you entire and is not an intoxication or delusion, but a joy you can see into, clear to the bottom. Do you understand what I mean?

— Rilke, Furnborg, Jonsered, Sweden, November 4, 1904
Letters to a Young Poet

Center of all centers, innermost core,
almond sweetening in its self-embrace —
all of this, out to the stars,
is the fruit of your body. We greet you.

You feel how little clings to you now.
Endlessness is your shell,
and there, too, the strength.
It is summoned by the radiance

of the full and glowing suns
that wheel around you.
Yet those stars will be outlasted
by what you have begun.

— Rilke, New Poems

In my isolation, searching for a way to punish man’s universal egoism, it’s true that I was jerking off my imagination, looking for punishment everywhere, even in death. You amuse yourself as best you can when you’re short of friends and don’t often get a chance to go out, much less to emerge from yourself and fuck.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

Is it not time
to free ourselves from the beloved
even as we, trembling, endure the loving?
As the arrow endures the bowstring’s tension
so that, released, it travels farther.
For there is nowhere to remain.

— Rilke, From the First Duino Elegy