In making contact with a work of art, nothing serves so ill as words of criticism: the invariable result is more or less happy misunderstandings. Things are not all so comprehensible and utterable as people would mostly have us believe. Most events are unutterable, consummating themselves in a sphere where word has never trod, and more unutterable than them all are works of art whose life endures by the side of our own that passes away.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet (p. 11)
It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring.
“The difference between real material poison and intellectual poison is that most material poison is disgusting to the taste, but intellectual poison, which takes the form of cheap newspapers or bad books, can unfortunately sometimes be attractive.”
For what distinguishes an overwhelmingly great idea from an ordinary, perhaps even incomprehensibly ordinary and mistaken one, is the fact that it is in a kind of molten state, as a result of which the ego enters into infinite expanses and the expanses of the universe enter into the ego, whereby it ceases to be possible to recognise what belongs to oneself and what to the infinite. Hence overwhelmingly great ideas consist of a body, which, like the human body, is compact but perishable, and of an eternal soul, which is what lends them their significance, but which is not compact—on the contrary, at every attempt to get hold of it in cold words it evaporates into nothingness.
Keep this thought a the ready at daybreak, and through the day and night – there is only one path to happiness, and that is in giving up all outside of our sphere of choice , regarding nothing else as your possession, surrendering all else to God and Fortune.
Marginalia List 