Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.... Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances... Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Nothing in the world can one imagine beforehand not the least thing. Everything is made up of so many unique particulars that cannot be foreseen.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Success which is something so simple in the end is made up of thousands of things we never fully know what.
Rainer Maria Rilke
One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest the more strongly you cultivate this belief the more will reality and the world go forth from it.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Who's not sat tense before his own heart's curtain?
Rainer Maria Rilke
Wanting to change to improve a person's situation means offering him for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Everyone once once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Wanting to change to improve a person's situation means offering him for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Everyone once once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Oh longing for places that were not Cherished enough in that fleeting hour How I long to make good from afar The forgotten gesture the additional act.
Rainer Maria Rilke
A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude. Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist a wonderful living side by side can grow up if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Love consists in this that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
Rainer Maria Rilke
This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love the more they give the more they possess.
Rainer Maria Rilke
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks the ultimate the last test and proof the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Nothing in this world can one imagine beforehand not the least thing. Everything is made up of so many unique particulars that cannot be foreseen.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The gnarled fidelity of an old habit.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Do continue to believe that with your feeling and your work you are taking part in the greatest the more strongly you cultivate in yourself this belief the more will reality and the world go forth from it.
Rainer Maria Rilke
That is the principal thing: not to remain with the dream with the intention with the being in the mood but always forcibly to convert it into all things.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Fame is the sum of the misunderstanding that gathers about a new name.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are moments when something new has entered into us something unknown.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Our being is continually undergoing and entering upon changes. ... We must strictly speaking at every moment give each other up and let each other go and not hold each other back.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Works of Art are of an infinite loneliness.
Rainer Maria Rilke
At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.
Rainer Maria Rilke
We only pass everything by like a transposition of air.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,like winter, which even now is passing.For beneath the winter is a winter so endlessthat to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing.Climb praising as you return to connection.Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient,be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.Be. And, at the same time, know what it is not to be.The emptiness inside you allows you to vibratein full resonance with your world. Use it for once.To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayablenumbers of beings abounding in Nature,add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Praise, my dear one.Let us disappear into praising.Nothing belongs to us.
Rainer Maria Rilke
(...) there are these fading, ageing girls who constantly let themselves go over the edge without resisting, strong girls, still unused in their innermost selves, who have never been loved. Perhaps, Lord, you mean me to leave everything and go love them. Otherwise why is it so difficult for me not to follow them when they pass me in the street? Why do I suddenly invent the sweetest, most nocturnal words, and why does my voice settle sweetly inside me between my throat and heart? Why do I imagine how I, with unutterable caution, would hold them to my breath, these dolls that life has been playing with, flinging their arms apart springtime after springtime for nothing, and again for nothing, until they became slack in the shoulders. They've never fallen from a very high hope, so they're not broken; but they're badly chipped already and too far gone. Only stray cats come to them in the evening in their rooms and keep giving them furtive scratches and then sleep on top of them. Sometimes I follow one of them down a couple of streets. They walk past the houses, people are continually coming along who blot them out, they go on fading until they are nothing.
Rainer Maria Rilke
For we, when we feel, evaporate: oh, webreathe ourselves out and away: from ember to ember,yielding us fainter fragrance.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I live my life in growing orbits which move out over this wondrous world, I am circling around God, around ancient towers and i have been circling for a thousand years. And I still dont know if I am an eagle or a storm or a great song.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. ...live in the question.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I believe that that love remains strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Fame is nothing but the sum of all the misunderstandings that cluster around a new name…Wherever a human achievement becomes truly great, it seeks to hide its face in the lap of general, nameless greatness.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstanding that can gather around a new name.
Rainer Maria Rilke
In the room...they are inside the books. They move sometimes within the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams.
Rainer Maria Rilke
THE UNICORN: The saintly hermit, midway through his prayersstopped suddenly, and raised his eyes to witnessthe unbelievable: for there before him stoodthe legendary creature, startling white, thathad approached, soundlessly, pleading with his eyes.The legs, so delicately shaped, balanced abody wrought of finest ivory. And ashe moved, his coat shone like reflected moonlight.High on his forehead rose the magic horn, the signof his uniqueness: a tower held upright by his alert, yet gentle, timid gait.The mouth of softest tints of rose and grey, whenopened slightly, revealed his gleaming teeth,whiter than snow. The nostrils quivered faintly:he sought to quench his thirst, to rest and find repose.His eyes looked far beyond the saint's enclosure,reflecting vistas and events long vanished,and closed the circle of this ancient mystic legend.
Rainer Maria Rilke
For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breatheourselves out and away; with each new heartfirewe give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us:you're in my blood, this room, Spring itselfis filled with you . . . To what end? He can't hold us,we vanish within him and around him.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
Rainer Maria Rilke
How he loved and yetwished to leave you: always both, at once.
Rainer Maria Rilke
If you think your world isn’t poetic enough, or exciting enough to tell a story about, that’s not because it’s a dull world, that’s because you’re not poet enough to wake its soul up.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Read the lines as if they were unknown to you, and you will feel in your inmost self how very much they are yours.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Sometimes she walks through the village in herlittle red dressall absorbed in restraining herself,and yet, despite herself, she seems to moveaccording to the rhythm of her life to come.She runs a bit, hesitates, stops,half-turns around...and, all while dreaming, shakes her headfor or against.Then she dances a few stepsthat she invents and forgets,no doubt finding out that lifemoves on too fast.It's not so much that she steps outof the small body enclosing her,but that all she carries in herselffrolics and ferments.It's this dress that she'll rememberlater in a sweet surrender;when her whole life is full of risks,the little red dress will always seem right.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now 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.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Don't take my devils away, because my angels may flee too.
Rainer Maria Rilke
If we only arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. 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.
Rainer Maria Rilke
How should we be able to forget those myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn 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. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Seulement la terre qui obéit,sait bien qu'elle tourne en rond,tandis que nous vers l'infininous précipitons.Translation:But the obedient Earth well knowsthat she moves round and round,whereas we hurtle downtoward infinity.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Bodily delight is a sensory experience, not any different from pure looking or the pure feeling with which a beautiful fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, an infinite learning that is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fullness and the splendor of all knowledge...the individual...can remember that all beauty in animals and plants is a silent, enduring form of love and yearning, and he can see the animal, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and multiplying and growing, not out of physical pleasure, not out of physical pain, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain, and more powerful than will and withstanding. If only human beings could more humbly receive this mystery---which the world is filled with...
Rainer Maria Rilke
Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Girls, there are poets who learn from youto say, what you, in your aloneness, are;and they learn through you to live distantness,as the evenings through the great starsbecome accustomed to eternity.
Rainer Maria Rilke
This advance (at first very much against the will of the outdistanced men) will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman. And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.
Rainer Maria Rilke
And these thingsthat keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient,they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue.They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts,into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Death is our friend, precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.
Rainer Maria Rilke
O smile, going where? O upturned look:new, warm, receding surge of the heart--;alas, we are that surge. Does then the cosmic spacewe dissolve in taste of us? Do the angelsreclaim only what is theirs, their own outstreamed existence,or sometimes, by accident, does a bit of usget mixed in? Are we blended in their featureslike the slight vagueness that complicates the looksof pregnant women? Unnoticed by them in theirwhirling back into themselves? (How could they notice?)
Rainer Maria Rilke
Everything that has been wrestled from doubtI welcome-the mouths that burst open afterlong knowledge of what it is to be mute.
Rainer Maria Rilke
When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.
Rainer Maria Rilke
If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing then you are a writer”"Se alla mattina quando ti alzi non pensi altro che allo scrivere allora sei uno scrittore
Rainer Maria Rilke
It is necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own.
Rainer Maria Rilke