Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

Biography

Type: Poet

Born: 4 December 1875

Died: 29 December 1926 (aged 51)

Rainer Maria Rilke is considered one of the German language's greatest 20th century poets. His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.

Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
Of her life, and weaves them gratefully
Into a single cloth –
It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
And clears it for a different celebration.

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

Society in its wisdom has found ways of constructing refuges of all kinds, for since it has been disposed to make the love-life a pastime, it has also felt obliged to trivialize it, to make it cheap, risk-free and secure, as public pleasures usually are.

His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.

There are no classes in life for beginners: right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,
because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
Every angel is terrible.

In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?

Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.

It was not in me It came and went
I wanted to hold it It was held by wine
(I no longer know what it was)

It wasn't his, it wasn't my fault,
we both had nothing except patience,
but Death has none.
I saw him come (how meanly!)
and I watched him as he took and took:
none of it I could claim as mine.

And when suddenly
the god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry,
uttered the words: ‘He has turned round’ –
she comprehended nothing and said softly: ‘Who?

Why don't you think of [God] as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity... the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are.

Look: the trees exist; the houses
we dwell in stand there stalwartly.
Only we
pass by it all, like a rush of air.
And everything conspires to keep quiet
about us,
half out of shame perhaps, half out of
some secret hope.

Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Every angel is terrifying.

I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.

It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case.

A billion stars go spinning through the night, / glittering above your head, / But in you is the presence that will be / when all the stars are dead.

Isn’t it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours
grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves
from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived:
the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string
to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.

Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.

Someday you will name me,
then gently place those burning
holy roses in my hair.

[Songs of Longing]

Art too is just a way of living.

O Stunden in der Kindheit,
da hinter den Figuren mehr als nur
Vergangnes war und vor uns nicht die Zukunft.

we want it visible
to show
when even the most
visible joy
will reveal itself
only when we have
transformed it within.

there’s nowhere, my love, the
world can exist
expect within.

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

I live my life in growing orbits which move out over the things of the world.

I want to unfold.
I don’t want to be folded anywhere,
because where I am folded,
there I am a lie.

only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

There are a large number of people in the room, but one is unaware of them. They are in the books. At times they move among the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

Bibliothèque Nationale. Ich sitze und lese einen Dichter. Es sind viele Leute im Saal, aber man spürt sie nicht. Sie sind in den Büchern. Manchmal bewegen sie sich in den Blättern, wie Menschen, die schlafen und sich umwenden zwischen zwei Träumen.

for sometime now I have believed that it is our own force, all our own force that is still too great for us. It is true that we do not know it; but is it not just that which is most our own of which we know the least?

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence. For beauty's nothing but the beginning of terror we're still just able to bear.

ما أجمل أن تكون بصحبة أناس يقرأون

How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.

Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.

And those, who come together in the night and are twined in quivering pleasure, are performing a serious work and are heaping up sweetness, depth and force for the song of some coming poet, who will arise to express inexpressible ecstasies

If only mankind could hold its own fertility in awe, which is one and the same whether it manifests itself in the spirit or in the flesh. For creativity in the spirit has its origins in the physical kind, is of one nature with it and only a more delicate, more rapt and less fleeting version of the carnal sort of sex.

Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious.

If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.

Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confidence in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer

Our heart always transcends us.

Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.

We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.

Art is childhood.

No one would dream of expecting a single individual to be "happy" - once someone is married, however, everyone is very astonished when he is not happy!

Above all marriage is a new task and a new seriousness - a new challenge and a question regarding the strength and kindness of each participant and a new great danger for both.

At first the solitude
charmed me like a prelude,
but so much music wounded me.

Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.

Oh hours of childhood,
when behind each shape more than the past appeared
and what streamed out before us was not the future.
We felt our bodies growing and were at times impatient to be grown up, half for the sake
of those with nothing left but their grownupness.

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.

May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.

and children are still the way you were ...as a child, sad and happy in just the same way and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value.

That is fundamentally the only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things that can befall us

Think... of the world which you carry within yourself... and set it above everything that you notice about you. Your inmost happening is worth your whole love, that is what you must somehow work at, and not loose too much time and too much courage in explaining your attitude to people.

Joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither
childhood nor future
lessens . . . . Superabundant existence
wells in my heart.

Now I come to you full of future. And from habit we begin to live our past.

Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Wishes are memories coming from our future!

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.

Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition.

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