Ultimately, this is what constitutes the events and values in the world: that time and again one hears of someone who has said things that one had thought only obscurely and has done things that one had expressed only at a fortuitous moment. Such things make you grow. This awareness of conduits and lines reaching from distant solitary figures to us and from us and to god knows where and to whom, this I consider our best feeling: it leaves us alone and yet simultaneously patches us into a great communality where we take hold and have help and hope.

From a letter by Rainer Maria Rilke to Otto Modersohn, June 25, 1902. Taken from Letters on Life, p37, edited and translated by Ulrich Baer

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