Authors — Quotes

Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes: 40

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.
Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
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.
Letters to a Young Poet
This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.
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.
Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.
Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
Let everything happen to youBeauty and terrorJust keep goingNo feeling is final
I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.
Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
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.
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.
Letters to a Young Poet
Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other.
Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you.Seal my ears, I'll go on hearing you.And without feet I can make my way to you,without a mouth I can swear your name.Break off my arms, I'll take hold of youwith my heart as with a hand.Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.And if you consume my brain with fire,I'll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.
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.
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
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.
Letters to a Young Poet
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terrorwhich we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,because it serenely disdains to destroy us.Every angel is terrible.
Duino Elegies
Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
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.
Letters to a Young Poet
That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.
If we surrenderedto earth's intelligencewe could rise up rooted, like trees.
Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
The only journey is the one within.
Every angel is terrifying.
Duino Elegies
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.
You darkness, that I come from,I love you more than all the firesthat fence in the world,for the fire makesa circle of light for everyone,and then no one outside learns of you.But the darkness pulls in everything:shapes and fires, animals and myself,how easily it gathers them! -powers and people -and it is possible a great energyis moving near me.I have faith in nights.
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.
There are no classes in life for beginners: right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.
She who reconciles the ill-matched threadsOf her life, and weaves them gratefullyInto a single cloth – It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hallAnd clears it for a different celebration.
I want my own will, and I wantsimply to be with my will,as it goes toward action.And in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times,when something is coming near,I want to be with those who knowsecret things or else alone...I want to unfold.I don’t want to be folded anywhere,because where I am folded,there I am a lie.
Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
Look: the trees exist; the houseswe dwell in stand there stalwartly. Only wepass 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.
Duino Elegies
If we surrenderedto earth’s intelligencewe could rise up rooted, like trees.Instead we entangle ourselvesin knots of our own makingand struggle, lonely and confused.So like children, we begin again...to fall,patiently to trust our heaviness.Even a bird has to do thatbefore he can fly.
Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
I live my life in widening circleThat reach out across the world. I may not ever complete the last one,But I give myself to it. I circle around God, that primordial tower.I have been circling for thousands of years,And I still don't know: am I a falcon,A storm, or a great song? [I, 2]
Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
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.
Duino Elegies
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.
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem:they might point to the catkins hangingfrom the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the raindescending on black earth in early spring. ---And we, who always think of happinessrising, would feel the emotionthat almost baffles uswhen a happy thing falls.
Duino Elegies
Someday you will name me, then gently place those burning holy roses in my hair.[Songs of Longing]
Rainer Maria Rilke - Sämtliche Werke (Complete Works)
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.
Letters to a Young Poet
It was not in me It came and wentI wanted to hold it It was held by wine(I no longer know what it was)
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.