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Start by following Rainer Maria Rilke.
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“it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.”
― Letters to a Young Poet
― Letters to a Young Poet
“No feeling is final.”
―
―
“Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.”
― Letters to a Young Poet
― Letters to a Young Poet
“Every angel is terrible. And yet, alas
I welcome you, almost fatal birds of the soul,
knowing about you.
...
If the archangel came now, the perilous one,
from the back of the stars but one step lower and
toward us,
our own high beating heart would slay us. Who are you?
You early successes, spoiled darlings of creation...”
―
I welcome you, almost fatal birds of the soul,
knowing about you.
...
If the archangel came now, the perilous one,
from the back of the stars but one step lower and
toward us,
our own high beating heart would slay us. Who are you?
You early successes, spoiled darlings of creation...”
―
“Here is the time for the sayable, here
is its home.
Speak and attest. More than ever
the things we can live with are falling
away,
and ousting them, filling their place,
a will with no image.
Will beneath crusts which readily crack
whenever the act inside swells and
seeks new borders.”
― Duino Elegies
is its home.
Speak and attest. More than ever
the things we can live with are falling
away,
and ousting them, filling their place,
a will with no image.
Will beneath crusts which readily crack
whenever the act inside swells and
seeks new borders.”
― Duino Elegies
“Look, I am living. On what? Neither the childhood nor future/ grows any smaller...Superabundant being/ wells up in my heart.”
―
―
“Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything.”
―
―
“I live my life in growing orbits which move out over the things of the world.”
―
―
“Around everything that is perfected, the unfinished ascends and intensifies.”
― The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
― The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
“I would describe myself like a landscape I’ve studied at length, in detail; like a word I’m coming to understand; like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime; like my mother’s face; like a ship that carried me when the waters raged.”
― Das Stunden-Buch
― Das Stunden-Buch
“And you suddenly know: It was here!
You pull yourself together, and there
stands an irrevocable year
of anguish and vision and prayer.”
― Rilke: Selected Poems
You pull yourself together, and there
stands an irrevocable year
of anguish and vision and prayer.”
― Rilke: Selected Poems
“ERANNA TO SAPPHO
O You wild adept at throwing!
Like a spear by other things, I'd lain
there beside my next of kin. Your strain
flung me far. To where's beyond my knowing.
None can bring me back again.
Sisters think upon me as they twine,
and the house is full of warm relation.
I alone am out of the design,
and I tremble like a supplication;
for the lovely goddess all creation
bowers in legend lives this life of mine.
SAPPHO TO ERANNA
With unrest I want to inundate you,
want to brandish you, you vine-wreathed stave.
Want, like death itself, to penetrate you
and to pass you onwards like the grave
to the All: to all these things that wait you.”
―
O You wild adept at throwing!
Like a spear by other things, I'd lain
there beside my next of kin. Your strain
flung me far. To where's beyond my knowing.
None can bring me back again.
Sisters think upon me as they twine,
and the house is full of warm relation.
I alone am out of the design,
and I tremble like a supplication;
for the lovely goddess all creation
bowers in legend lives this life of mine.
SAPPHO TO ERANNA
With unrest I want to inundate you,
want to brandish you, you vine-wreathed stave.
Want, like death itself, to penetrate you
and to pass you onwards like the grave
to the All: to all these things that wait you.”
―
“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.”
― Duino Elegies
― Duino Elegies
“Out of infinite longings rise
finite deeds like weak fountains,
falling back just in time and trembling.
And yet, what otherwise remains silent,
our happy energies—show themselves
in these dancing tears.”
―
finite deeds like weak fountains,
falling back just in time and trembling.
And yet, what otherwise remains silent,
our happy energies—show themselves
in these dancing tears.”
―
“Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.”
― The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke
― The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke
“Live the questions now”
― Letters to a Young Poet
― Letters to a Young Poet
“Confess to yourself in the deepest hour of the night whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. Dig deep into your heart, where the answer spreads its roots in your being, and ask yourself solemnly, Must I write?”
― Letters to a Young Poet
― Letters to a Young Poet
“Joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness.”
― Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose
― Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose
“what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them.”
― Letters to a Young Poet
― Letters to a Young Poet
“O trees of life, O when are you wintering?
We are not unified. We have no instincts
like those of migratory birds. Useless, and late,
we force ourselves, suddenly, onto the wind,
and fall down to an indifferent lake.
We realise flowering and fading together.
And somewhere lions still roam. Never knowing,
as long as they have their splendour, of any weakness.”
― Duino Elegies
We are not unified. We have no instincts
like those of migratory birds. Useless, and late,
we force ourselves, suddenly, onto the wind,
and fall down to an indifferent lake.
We realise flowering and fading together.
And somewhere lions still roam. Never knowing,
as long as they have their splendour, of any weakness.”
― Duino Elegies
“But your solitude will be your home and haven even in the midst of very strange conditions, and from there you will discover all your paths.”
― Letters to a Young Poet
― Letters to a Young Poet
“I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.
Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless.
So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:
a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.”
― Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.
Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless.
So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:
a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.”
― Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
“When I think about little girls in the moment of turning into big girls (it is no slow timid development but something strangely sudden), I always have to imagine an ocean behind them, or a grave eternal plain, or something else you don't actually see with your eyes but can only sense, and that only in the deep and silent hours. Then I see the big girls as being exactly as big as I was used to the little childlike girls being small--and Heaven above knows why, that's just how I want to see them. There is a reason for everything. But the best things that happen, after all, are the ones which hide their deeper reason with both hands, whether out of modesty or because they don't want to be betrayed.”
―
―
“You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.”
― Letters to a Young Poet
― Letters to a Young Poet
“Those doves below, the ones utterly cared for, never endangered ones, cannot know tenderness.”
―
―
“I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.”
―
―
“Ask no one to speak of you, not even contemptuously. And when time passes and you notice how your name is spreading around among people, don't take it more seriously than any of the other things you find on their lips. Think: your name has turned bad, and get rid of it. Take on another, any other, so that God can call you in the night. And conceal it from everyone.”
― The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
― The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
“How we squander our sorrows, gazing beyond them
into the sad wastes of duration,
to see if maybe they have a limit.”
― Duino Elegies
into the sad wastes of duration,
to see if maybe they have a limit.”
― Duino Elegies
“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.”
― Letters to a Young Poet
― Letters to a Young Poet
“Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting
still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation.
When something's let go of, it circles; and though we are
rarely the center
of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous
curve.”
―
still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation.
When something's let go of, it circles; and though we are
rarely the center
of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous
curve.”
―
