Rainer Maria Rilke

1875-1926, Czech-Austrian Poet

Action / Effort
That is the principal thing – not to remain with the dream, with the intention, with the being-in-the-mood, but always forcibly to convert it into all things.
Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 1892-1910

Actualization / Fulfillment
Do continue to believe that with your feeling and your work you are taking part in the greatest ; the more strongly you cultivate in yourself this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it.
Ibid.

Adversity
Be of good courage, all is before you, and time passed in the difficult is never lost … What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.
Ibid.

Being / Essence / Soul
Extensive as the "external" world is, with all its sidereal distances it hardly bears comparison with the dimensions, the depth-dimensions , of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the universe to be, in itself, almost unlimited. It seems to me more and more as though our ordinary consciousness inhabited the apex of a pyramid whose base in us (and, as it were, beneath us) broadens out to such an extent that the farther we are able to let ourselves down into it, the more completely do we appear to be included in the realities of earthly and, in the widest sense, worldly , existence, which are not dependent on time and space. From my earliest youth I have felt the intuition that at some deeper cross-section of this pyramid of consciousness, mere being could become an event, the inviolable presence and simultaneity of everything that we, on the upper, "normal," apex of self-consciousness, are permitted to experience only as entropy.