Rainer Maria Rilke > Quotes

“it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all the tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners at everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we 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. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“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, Letters to a Young Poet

“And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves - not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“It is also good to love: because love is difficult.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse...go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to, the question of whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will discover that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside.”
― Rilke Letters to a Young Poet

“So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“It is nothing but a breath, the void.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Swells, Marina? we ocean, depths, Marina? we sky!”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Best of Rilke

“If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“What else can I tell you? It seems to me that everything has its proper emphasis; and finally I want to add just one more bit of advice: to keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your whole development; you couldn't disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to questions that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer.”
― Rilke,Letters to a Young Poet

“Verses are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough) -- they are experiences. For the sake of a verse one must see many cities, men, and things, one must know the animals feel how birds fly, and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.”
― Rilke Rainer Maria, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: A Novel

“If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Outside much has changed. I don't know how. But inside and before you, O my God, inside before you, spectator, are we not without action? We discover, indeed, that we do not know our part, we look for a mirror, we want to rub off the make-up and remove the counterfeit and be real. But somewhere a bit of mummery still sticks to us that we forget. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows, we do not notice that the corners of our lips are twisted. And thus we go about, a laughing-stock, a mere half-thing: neither existing, not actors.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“You must change your life.”
― R.M. Rilke

“O Lord, give each person his own personal death. / A thing that moves out of the same life he lived, / In which he had love, and intelligence, and trouble.”
― Rilke Rainer Maria

“If people took some simple pleasure in reality (which is entirely independent of time), they would never have needed to come up with the idea that they could ever again lose anything with which they had truly bonded. No constellation is as steadfast, no accomplishment as irrevocable as a connection between human beings which, at the very moment it becomes visible, works more forcefully in those invisible depths where our existence is as lasting as gold lodged in stone, more constant than a star.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“Long you must suffer, knowing not what,
until suddenly out of spitefully chewed fruit your suffering's taste comes forth in you.
Then you will love almost instantly what's tasted. No one will ever talk you out of it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“We only pass everything by
like a transposition of air.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“Almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Isn’t it time that, loving, we freed ourselves
from the beloved, and, trembling, endured:
as the arrow endures the bow, so as to be,
in its flight, something more than itself?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“To go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Then take the destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury, are beginning to grow lazy and indifferent; the desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare. In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one's own.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Do not, do not, do not books for ever
hammer at people like perpetual bells?
When, between two books, silent sky appears: be glad.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“And so I check myself and swallow the luring call
of dark sobs. Alas, whom can we turn to
in our need? Not angels, not humans,
and the sly animals see at once
how little at home we are
in the interpreted world. That leaves us
some tree on a hillside, on which our eyes fasten
day after day; leaves us yesterday’s street
and the coddled loyalty of an old habit
that liked it here, stayed on, and never left.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“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.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“the knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance.”
― Rilke-Gesellschaft, Rilke, die Donaumonarchie und ihre Nachfolgestaaten: Vorträge der Jahrestagung der Rilke-Gesellschaft 1993 in Budapest (Budapester Beiträge zur Germanistik)

“What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours – that is what one must arrive at. Loneliness of the kind one knew as a child, when the grown-ups went back and forth bound up in things which seemed grave and weighty because they looked so busy, and because one had no idea what they were up to.

And when one day you realise that their preoccupations are meagre, their professions barren and no longer connected to life, why not continue to look on them like a child, as if on something alien, drawing on the depths of your own world, on the expanse of your own solitude, which itself is work and achievement and a vocation? Why wish to exchange a child’s wise incomprehension for rejection and contempt, when incomprehension is solitude, whereas rejection and contempt are ways of participating in what, by precisely these means, you want to sever yourself from?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet