# Quote — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

> It must be immense, this silence, in which sounds and movements have room, and if one thinks that along with all this the presence of the distant sea also resounds, perhaps as the innermost note in this prehistoric harmony, then one can only wish that you are trustingly and patiently letting the magnificent solitude work upon you, this solitude which can no longer be erased from your life; which, in everything that is in store for you to experience and to do, will act as an anonymous influence, continuously and gently decisive, rather as the blood of our ancestors incessantly moves in us and combines with our own to form the unique, unrepeatable being that we are at every turning of our life.

- Author: [Rainer Maria Rilke](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke.md)
- Book: [Letters to a Young Poet](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rainer_Maria_Rilke#Letters_to_a_Young_Poet_(1934)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet/it-must-be-immense

## More from this book

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet/be-patient-toward.md)

> Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become world, to become world for himself for another's sake. It is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet/love-is-at-first.md)

> Young people -it is obvious -cannot achieve such a relationship, but they can, if they understand their life properly, grow up slowly to such happiness and prepare themselves for it. They must not forget, when they love, that they are beginners, bunglers of life, apprentices in love- must learn love, and that like all learning wants peace, patience, and composure.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/rainer-maria-rilke/letters-to-a-young-poet/young-people-it-is-obvious.md)