On [:] The small things | Rainer Maria Rilke, 1901

Gustav Klimt, Lakeside with Birch Trees, 1901

“So it comes to pass that most people don’t know at all how beautiful the world is and how much splendor is revealed in the smallest things, in some flower, a stone, the bark of a tree, or a birch leaf. Grown-up people, who have business and cares and worry about a lot of trifles, gradually lose their eye entirely for these riches which children, when they are alert and good children, soon notice with all their hearts. And yet the finest thing would be if all people would always stay in this relationship like alert and good children, with simple and reverent feelings, […] There is a great and eternal beauty throughout the world, and it is scattered justly over the small things and the big; for in the important and essential there is no injustice on the whole earth.”

Rainer Maria Rilke,  letter to Helmuth Westhoff, 1901