Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes
Avoid providing material for the drama that is always stretched tight between parents and children; it uses up much of the children’s strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn’t comprehend. Don’t ask for advice from them and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is strength and blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. Translated by Stephen Mitchell, Vintage Books, 1984, p. 38.
The Prophet had ruled that before the age of 7, the mother always retained custody unless she remarried in which case custody, went to the father. A divorced couple with their 7 year old son had been brought before him for a custody decision. Based on this decision, Islamic law makes a boy choose between his 2 parents after he/she reaches the age of 7. Girls reaching 7, transfer to the custody of their father until they are married.
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, better known as Rainer Maria Rilke (German: [ˈʁaɪnɐ maˈʁiːa ˈʁɪlkə]), was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist. He is "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets". He wrote both verse and highly lyrical prose. Several critics have described Rilke's work as "mystical". His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry and several volumes of correspondence in which he invokes images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude and anxiety. These themes position him as a transitional figure between traditional and modernist writers.
