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Who can be my advisor? What should I do first? I have many questions, but no answer! I feel alone. Should I believe in God? How do I escape conventions? How can I know the real quality?

R. M. Rilke: Letter to a young poet

   Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature... Read Complete

Rilke wrote his first letter to a young poet (the original title is "Briefe an einen jungen Dichter") in the February of 1903 and the last one in the December of 1908. He had already written the "Book of Images". Read more... Cf. Plato, Books can be your worst enemies Jaspers, Truth is in communication Kierkegaard, My work as an author Emerson, Reading and writing as self-knowledge  Francis Bacon, Reading & writing as moral activities Tom Schulman, Dead Poets Society Gibson - MacRury, The man without a face J. M. Lefévre, The White Thinking Dostoevsky, The dream of ridiculous man