Rainer Maria Rilke > Quotes

“As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.

Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.

To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions...For the god
wants to know himself in you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Ein Jeder engel ist schrecklich.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“And when what is near you is far, then your distance is already among the stars and very large; rejoice in your growth, in which you naturally can take no one with you, and be kind to those who remain behind, and be sure and calm before them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with Your confidence or joy, which they could not understand.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“His smile was so soft and fine:
like gleaming old ivory,
like homesickness, like a Christmas snowfall
in the dark village, like turquoise
around which many pearls are fashioned,
like moonlight
on a favorite book.

-in Mädchenmelancholie (Girls' melancholy)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“Yes, the Springs needed you. Many a star was waiting
for your eyes only. A wave swelled toward you
out of the past, or as you walked by the open window
a violin inside surrendered itself
to pure passion. All that was your charge.
But were you strong enough? Weren't you always distracted
by expectation, as though each such moment
presaged a beloved's coming? (But where would you keep her,
with all those big strange thoughts in you
going and coming and sometimes staying all night?)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“The essence of love lies not in communion, but in the fact that each partner forces the other to become something, something infinitely great, the extreme limit of his strength.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne

“Was soll ich mit meinem Munde? Mit meiner Nacht? Mit meinem Tag? Ich habe keine Geliebte, kein Haus, keine Stelle auf der ich lebe”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Lovers, if Angels could understand them, might utter
strange things in the midnight air. For it seems that everything's
trying to hide us. Look, the trees exist; the houses
we live in still stand where they were. We only
pass everything by like a transposition of air.
And all combines to suppress us, partly as shame,
perhaps, and partly as inexpressible hope.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in the hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“but those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Let your beauty manifest itself
without talking and calculation.
You are silent. It says for you: I am.
And comes in meaning thousandfold,
comes at long last over everyone.

(Gieb deine Schönheit immer hin
ohne Rechnen und Reden.
Du schweigst. Sie sagt für dich: Ich bin.
Und kommt in tausendfachem Sinn,
kommt endlich über jeden.)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“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. Ach, wie gut ist es doch, unter lesenden Menschen zu sein. Warum ist es nicht immer so?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Früher wusste man (oder vielleicht ahnte man es), dass man den Tod in sich hatte wir die Frucht den Kern. Die Kinder hatten einen kleinen und die Erwachsenen einen großen. Die Frauen hatten ihn im Schoß und die Männer in der Brust. Den hatte man, und das gab einem eine eigentümliche Würde und einen stillen Stolz.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge

“Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.

*********
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which is in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

*********
Ah, but what can we take along
into that other realm? Not the act of looking,
which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.
The sufferings, then. And above all, the heaviness,
and long experience of love, – just what is wholly
unsayable.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“But now that so much is changing, isn't it time for us to change? Couldn't we try to gradually develop and slowly take upon ourselves, little by little, our part in the great task of love? We have been spared all its trouble, and that is why it has slipped in among our distractions, as a piece of real lace will sometimes fall into a child's toy-box and please him and no longer please him, and finally it lies there among the broken and dismembered toys, more wretched than any of them. We have been spoiled by superficial pleasures like dilettantes, and are looked upon as masters. But what if we despised our successes? What if we started from the very outset to learn the task of love, which has always been done for us? What if we went ahead and became beginners, now that much is changing?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a lone one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences.

For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else—); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars, and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that.

You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

- For the Sake of a Single Poem”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“I rushed to the mirror and with difficulty watched through the mask the working of my hands. But for this the mirror had just been waiting. Its moment of retaliation had come. While I strove in boundlessly increasing anguish to squeeze somehow out of my disguise, it forced me, by what means I do not know, to lift my eyes and imposed on me an image, no, a reality, a strange, unbelievable and monstrous reality, with which, against my will, I became permeated: for now the mirror was the stronger, and I was the mirror. I stared at this great, terrifying unknown before me, and it seemed to me appalling to be alone with him. But at the very moment I thought this, the worst befell: I lost all sense, I simply ceased to exist. For one second I had an indescribable, painful and futile longing for myself, then there was only he: there was nothing but he...
They did not spring forward to the rescue; their cruelty knows no bounds. They stood there and laughed; my God, they could stand there and laugh. I wept, but the mask did not let the tears escape; they ran down inside over my cheeks and dried at once and ran again and dried. And at last I knelt before them, as no human being ever knelt; I knelt, and lifted up my hands and implored them: "Take me out, if you still can, and keep me", but they did not hear; I had no longer any voice.
I sank down and they went on laughing, thinking that was part of it. They were used to that from me. But then I had continued to lie there and had not answered. And their fright when they finally discovered that I was unconscious and lay there like a piece of something among all those wrappings, just like a piece of something.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“They grope before them like blind people and find each the other as they would a door. Almost like children that dread the night, they press close into each other. And yet they are not afraid. There is nothing that might be against them: no yesterday, no morrow; for time is shattered. And they flower from its ruins.
He does not ask: 'Your husband?'
She does not ask: 'Your name?'
For indeed they have found each other, to be unto themselves a new generation.
They will give each other a hundred new names and take them all off again, gently, as one takes an earring off.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke

“One must never despair upon losing something, whether it is an individual or an experience of joy or happiness; everything returns even more magnificently. What has to decline, declines; what belongs to us, stays with us, for everything works according to laws that are greater than our capacity for understanding and that only seem to contradict us. You have to live within yourself and think of all of life, all of its millions of possibilities, openings, and futures in relation to which there exists nothing that is past or has been lost.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“How much such a little moon can do. There are days when everything about one is bright, light, scarcely stated in the clear air and yet distinct. Even what lies nearest has tones of distance, has been taken away and is only shown, not proffered; and everything related to expanse–the river, the bridges, the longs streets, and the squares that squander themselves–has taken that expanse in behind itself, is painted on it as on silk. It is not possible to say what a bright green wagon on the Pont-Neuf can then become, or some red that is not to be held in, or even a simple placard on the party wall of a pearl-grey group of houses. Everything is simplified, brought into a few right, clear planes, like the face in a Manet portrait. And nothing is trivial and superfluous. The booksellers on the quai open their stalls, and the fresh or worn yellow of their books, the violet brown of the bindings, the bigger green of an album–everything harmonizes, counts, takes part, creating a fulness in which nothing lacks”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“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, Letters to a Young Poet

“Everything must be carried to term before it is born. To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I am thinking of a summer on the Baltic when I was a child: how talkative I was to sea and forest; how, filled with unaccustomed exuberance, I tried to leap over all limits with the hasty excitement of my words. And how, as I had to take my leave on a morning in September, I saw that we never give utterance to what is final and most blessed, and that all my rhapsodic Table d’hote conversations did not approach either my inchoate feelings or the ocean’s eternal self-revelation.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke