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Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

— Rainer Maria Rilke Sunbeams : A Book of Quotations (1990)

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More quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.

Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

The demands which the difficult work of love makes upon our development are more than life-size, and as beginners we are not up to them.

Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

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

Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity.

Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

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Patience is a necessary ingredient of genius.

Benjamin Disraeli Contarini Fleming (1832)

Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.

Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1865)

The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.

Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1865)

Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.

Plutarch

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Rainer Maria Rilke (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.