Glenstone Museum, Potomac, MD

*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

And your doubt may become a good quality if you train it.  It must  become knowing, it must become critical.  Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perplexed and embarrassed perhaps, or perhaps rebellious.  But don’t give in, insist on arguments and act this way, watchful and consistent, every single time, and the day will arrive when from a destroyer it will become one of  your best workers – perhaps the cleverest of all that are building at your life.     

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Translation by M.D. Herter Norton

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