Rainer Maria Rilke has been one of my favorite poets for a long time. Recently as I was digging through an old writer’s notebook (from 4 years ago), I came across this list of advice I gathered from Letters to a Young Poet:

You can see some quotations from Letters to a Young Poet here on wikiquote. Also, I didn’t realize it, but that last bit totally showed up in my personal mission statement, which I wrote about here.