“You are so young, all still lies ahead of you, and I should like to ask you, as best as I can...to be patient towards all that is unresolved in you heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.”

Annotation

Letter to Franz Xaver Kappus (Worpswede near Bremen, 16 July 1903).

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