And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience … Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
— Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
I am I is the essence of self-acceptance. But it is not passive or selective self-acceptance. It is active, loud, strong, and, if necessary, heroically aggressive. It applies to all aspects of self …
Judgment value, moral equivocation, cultural and conventional values, the ideas of others do not cause me to deaden, repress or attempt to cut off parts of myself. I includes all that the culture may see as assets, liabilities, limitations, resources, insensitivities, cruelties, neurotic, good, bad, sensitive, wise or stupid in me.
— Compassion and Self Hate, Theodore Isaac Rubin
While you believe you are in a body, however, you can choose between loveless and miraculous channels of expression. You can make an empty shell, but you cannot express nothing at all. You can wait, delay, paralyze yourself, or reduce your creativity almost to nothing. But you cannot abolish it. You can destroy your medium of communication, but not your potential*. You did not create yourself.
*capable of development into actuality
— A Course in Miracles
The fact is, I can’t give up sleeping with the window open. Electric tramcars with all their bells ringing rage through my room. Automobiles drive across me. A door slams. Somewhere glass from a broken window clatters to the ground. I can hear the big pieces laughing and the little splinters sniggering. Then suddenly a dull muffled sound from inside a house on the other side. Someone’s coming up the stairs. Coming, coming, on and on, is there for a long time, goes past. Back in the street. A girl shrieks: ‘Ah, tais-toi, je ne veux plus!’ The tram, mad with excitement, races up, and across, and away. Someone is calling. People are running, overtaking one another. A dog barks. What a relief: a dog. Toward morning there’s even a cock crowing, and what a boundless blessing it is. Then, abruptly, I fall asleep.
— The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke
