Rainer Maria Rilke > Quotes

“It is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it... that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it...To love is good, too: love being difficult.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“We’re involved with flower, fruit, grapevine.
They speak more than the language of the year.
Out of the darkness a blaze of colors appears,
and one perhaps that has the jealous shine

Of the dead, those who strengthen the earth.
What do we know of the part they assume?
It’s long been their habit to marrow the loam
with their own free marrow through and through.

Now the one question: Is it done gladly?
The work of sullen slaves, does this fruit
thrust up, clenched, toward us, its masters?

Sleeping with roots, granting us only
out of their surplus this hybrid made of mute
strength and kisses — are they the masters?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Sometimes she walks through the village in her
little red dress
all absorbed in restraining herself,
and yet, despite herself, she seems to move
according to the rhythm of her life to come.

She runs a bit, hesitates, stops,
half-turns around...
and, all while dreaming, shakes her head
for or against.

Then she dances a few steps
that she invents and forgets,
no doubt finding out that life
moves on too fast.

It's not so much that she steps out
of the small body enclosing her,
but that all she carries in herself
frolics and ferments.

It's this dress that she'll remember
later in a sweet surrender;
when her whole life is full of risks,
the little red dress will always seem right.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what?--: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out,--
holy departure:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Wie hab ich das gefühlt was Abschied heißt.
Wie weiß ichs noch: ein dunkles unverwundnes
grausames etwas, das ein Schönverbundnes
noch einmal zeigt und hinhält und zerreißt.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“what transported me into raptures were the sweeping cloaks, the wraps, the shawls, the veils, all those yielding, magnificent, unused materials that were soft and caressing, or so sheer that I could hardly keep hold of them, or so light that they flew by me like a wind, or simply heavy with all their own weight. It was in them I saw, for the first time, truly free and infinitely variable possibilities: to be a slave girl and sold off, or to be Joan of Arc, or an old king, sorcerer; all these I now held in my hand”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Whoever you are: in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything;”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poetry of Rilke

“Who has turned us around like this, so that
whatever we do, we find ourselves in the attitude
of someone going away? Just as that person
on the last hill, which shows him his whole valley
one last time, turns, stops, lingers -
so we live, forever taking our leave.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“There is probably no point in my going into your questions now; for what I could say about your tendency to doubt or about your inability to bring your outer and inner lives into harmony or about all the other thing that oppress you - : is just what I have already said: just the wish that you may find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith; that you may gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people. And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“We, hurt by ourselves, keen
to be hurters and keen
to be hurt back deep inside.
We, like weapons laid
beside anger asleep.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“If it were possible for us to see further than our knowledge extends and out a little over the outworks of our surmising, perhaps we should then bear our sorrows with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new, something unknown, has entered us.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“We become so accustomed to you,
we no longer look up
when your shadow falls over the book we are reading
and makes it glow. For all things
sing you: at times
we just hear them more clearly.

Often when I imagine you
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer
and I am dark, I am forest.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“MUSIC: Take me by the hand;
it's so easy for you, Angel,
for you are the road
even while being immobile.

You see, I'm scared no one
here will look for me again;
I couldn't make use of
whatever was given,

so they abandoned me.
At first the solitude
charmed me like a prelude,
but so much music wounded me.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Everywhere I am folded, there I am a lie.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Great sadnesses … they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Какво искам от теб (...)? Нищо. Всичко. Да ми разрешиш всеки миг от живота си да гледам нагоре към теб – като към планински връх, който ме закриля (такъв един каменен ангел пазител!). Докато не те познавах, това беше възможно, сега, когато те познавам, е нужно разрешение.
Защото душата ми е добре възпитана.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Писма до един млад поет / Писма до една млада жена / Райнер Мария Рилке – Марина Цветаева: кореспонденция

“Isn't it time that, in love, we freed ourselves
from the loved one and, trembling, endured:
as the arrow endures the string, collecting itself
to be more than itself as it shoots?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“Love at first has nothing to do with unfolding, abandon and uniting with another person (for what would be the sense in a union of what is unrefined and unfinished, still second order?); for the individual it is a grand opportunity to mature, to become something in himself, to become a world, to become a world in himself for another’s sake; it is a great immoderate demand made upon the self, something that singles him out and summons him to vast designs.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“For this reason, my dear Sir, the only advice I have is this: to go into yourself and to examine the depths from which your life springs; at its source you will find the answer to the question of whether you have to write. Accept this answer as it is, without seeking to interpret it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then assume this fate and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking after the rewards that may come from outside. For he who creates must be a world of his own and find everything within himself and in the natural world that he has elected to follow.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Kendi içine yürümek ve saatler boyu kimselere rastlamamak.
İşte erişilmesi gereken şey bizler için”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“If the confident animal coming toward us
had a mind like ours,
the change in him would startle us.
But to him his own being is endless,
undefined, and without regard
for his condition: clear,
like his eyes. Where we see future,
he sees all, and himself
in all, made whole for always.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Sin is the most wonderfully roundabout path to God”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“The more we speak of solitude, the clearer it becomes that at the bottom it is not something one can choose to take or leave. We are lonely. One can deceive oneself about it and act as if it were not so. That is all. But it is so much better to see that we are so, indeed even to presuppose it. It will make us dizzy, of course; because all the focal points on which our eyes were used to resting are taken away from us, there is nothing near us anymore, and everything distant is infinitely distant.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“This humanity of woman, brought forth in pains and degradations, will come to light when she has shed the conventions of mere femininity in the alterations of her outward station, and the men who today do not feel it coming will be surprised and struck by it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Whether it be the singing of a lamp or the voice of a storm, whether it be the breath of an evening or the groan of the ocean — whatever surrounds you, a broad melody always wakes behind you, woven out of a thousand voices, where there is room for your own solo only here and there. To know when you need to join in: that is the secret of your solitude: just as the art of true interactions with others is to let yourself fall away from high words into a single common melody.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Collected Works of Rainer Maria Rilke: The Complete Works PergamonMedia

“The aim of marriage, as I feel it, is not by means of demolition and overthrowing of all boundaries to create a hasty communion, the good marriage is rather one in which each appoints the other as guardian of his solitude and shews him this greatest trust that he has to confer. A togetherness of two human beings is an impossibility and, where it does seem to exist, a limitation, a mutual compromise which robs one side or both sides of their fullest freedom and development. “But granted the consciousness that even between the closest people there persist infinite distances, a wonderful living side by side can arise for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of seeing one another in whole shape and before a great sky!”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“أتوسل إليك، أن تتخلى عن كل هذا. أنت تتطلع إلى الخارج، وإلى كل الأفعال التى لابد أن لا تفعلها الآن. لن يستطيع أى أحد أن ينصحك أو أن يساعدك، لا أحد. يوجد وسيلة وحيدة فقط. اذهب إلى داخل نفسك. اكتشف الدافع الذى يأمرك بالكتابة، افحص ما إذا كان يضرب جذوره فى أعمق مكان من قلبك، اكتشف لنفسك ما إذا كنت ستموت أم لا لو أنك حرمت من الكتابة. وقبل كل شىء، اسأل نفسك فى أحلك ساعات الليل، ألابد أن اكتب؟ احفر عميقاً فى نفسك بحثاً عن اجابة عميقة. وإذا ما كانت الإجابة إيجابية على السؤال، لو أجبت على هذا السؤال المقدس ب "لابد" قوية وبسيطة، شيّد حياتك إذاً بناء على هذه الضرورة”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“And those, who come together in the night and are twined in quivering pleasure, are performing a serious work and are heaping up sweetness, depth and force for the song of some coming poet, who will arise to express inexpressible ecstasies”
― Rainer Maria Rilke