Vier

To be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves 

like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.

And the point is to live everything.

Live the questions now.

Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping 

and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living; 

train yourself to it--but take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, 

out of some need of your inmost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.

But they are difficult things which we have been charged; 

almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.

Therefore, love your solitude and bear with sweet-sounding lamentation the suffering it causes you.

For those who are near you are far, you say, and that shows it is beginning to grow wide about you.

And when what is near you is far, then your distance is already among the stars and very large; 

rejoice in your growth, in which you naturally can take no one with you, 

and be kind to those who remain behind, and be sure and calm before them and do not torment them 

with your doubts and do not frighten them with your confidence or joy, which they could not understand.

Ask no advice from them and count upon no understanding; 

but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance and trust that in this love

 there is a strength and a blessing, out beyond which you do not have to step in order to go very far!

But your solitude will be a hold and home for you even amid very unfamiliar conditions 

and from there you will find all your ways.