Rainer Maria Rilke > Quotes

“How they are all about, these gentlemen
In chamberlains' apparel, stocked and laced,
Like night around their order's star and gem
And growing ever darker, stony-faced,
And these, their ladies, fragile, wan, but propped
High by their bodice, one hand loosely dropped,
Small like its collar, on the toy King-Charles:
How they surround each one of these who stopped
To read and contemplate the objects d'art,
Of which some pieces still are theirs, not ours.

Whit exquisite decorum they allow us
A life of whose dimensions we seem sure
And which they cannot grasp. They were alive
To bloom, that is be fair; we, to mature,
That is to be of darkness and to strive.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Best of Rilke

“Du mußt dein Leben ändern.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“For what I could say to you about your inclination to doubt or about your inability to bring your inner and outer life into harmony, or about everything else that causes you concern -- it is always that which I have already said: it is always my wish that you might find enough patience within yourself to endure, and enough innocence to have faith. It is my wish that you might gain more and more trust in whatever is difficult for you, in your aloneness, among other thing. Allow life to happen to you. Believe me, life is right in all cases.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Riding, riding, riding, through the dag, through the night, through the day. And the heart has become so tired, and the longing so vast.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke

“Believe in a love that is preserved for you like a heritage, and trust that in this love there is a strength and a blessing which you are not bound to leave behind you though you may travel far!”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Tout ce qui nous émeut, tu le partages.
Mais ce qui t'arrive, nous l'ignorons.
Il faudrait être cent papillons
pour lire toutes tes pages.

Il y en a d'entre vous qui sont comme des dictionnaires;
ceux qui les cueillent
ont envie de faire relier toutes ces feuilles.
Moi, j'aime les roses épistolaires.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke

“If only mankind could hold its own fertility in awe, which is one and the same whether it manifests itself in the spirit or in the flesh. For creativity in the spirit has its origins in the physical kind, is of one nature with it and only a more delicate, more rapt and less fleeting version of the carnal sort of sex.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“For the creator must be a world for himself, and find everything within himself, and in Nature to which he has attached himself.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“You become more protective and more capable of granting protection exactly to the extent that you have lost and now lack protection. The solitude into which you were cast so violently makes you capable of balancing out the loneliness of others to exactly the same degree.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“Among people, particularly those I love, I so easily get talking and give out everything possible in conversation, so that it is not available for my work. It is a stupid piece of clumsiness that I am so wanting in the gift of sociability, the talent for easy but at the same time recreative conversations, in which one does not exert and expend onesel”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“And when this power [Richard Dehmel's poetic power], coursing through his being, reaches his sexuality, it doesn't find quite the pure human being it needs. The world of sexuality it finds is not entirely mature and pure, it is not human enough, only virile, rut, intoxication, restlessness, and weighed down by the old prejudices and arrogance with which men have disfigured and overburdened love. Because he loves only as a man, not as a human being, there is in his sense of sexuality something narrow, seemingly savage, hateful, time-bound, uneternal that diminishes his art and makes it ambivalent and doubtful.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“(…) und ich möchte Sie, so gut ich es kann bitten, Geduld zu haben gegen alles Ungelöste in Ihrem Herzen und zu versuchen, die Fragen selbst lieb zu haben, wie verschlossene Stuben und wie Bücher, die in einer fremden Sprache geschrieben sind. Forschen Sie jetzt nicht nach den Antworten, die Ihnen nicht gegeben werden können, weil Sie sie jetzt nicht leben könnten. Und es handelt sich darum, alles zu leben. Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen. Vielleicht leben Sie dann allmählich, ohne es zu merken, eines fernen Tages in die Antworten hinein.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“I believe that one is never more just than at those moments when one admires unreservedly and with absolute devotion.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Everywhere transience is plunging into the depths of Being . . . . It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, "invisibly," inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Contre qui, rose,
avez-vous adopté
ces épines?
Votre joie trop fine
vous a-t-elle forcée
de devenir cette chose
armée?

Mais de qui vous protège
cette arme exagérée?
Combien d’ennemis vous ai-je
enlevés
qui ne la craignaient point?
Au contraire, d’été en automne,
vous blessez les soins
qu’on vous donne.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke

“turn towards great and serious subjects, next to which irony becomes small and helpless.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Like the curved pipe of a fountain, your arching boughs
drive the sap
downward and up again: and almost without awakening
it bursts out of sleep, into its sweetest achievement.
Like the god stepping into the swan.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“Aber nun, da so vieles anders wird, ist es nicht an uns, uns zu verändern? Könnten wir nicht versuchen, uns ein wenig zu entwickeln, und unseren Anteil Arbeit in der Liebe langsam auf uns nehmen nach und nach? Man hat uns alle ihre Mühsal erspart, und so ist sie uns unter die Zerstreuungen geglitten, wie in eines Kindes Spiellade manchmal ein Stück echter Spitze fällt und freut und nicht mehr freut und endlich daliegt unter Zerbrochenem und Auseinandergenommenem, schlechter als alles. Wir sind verdorben vom leichten Genuß wie alle Dilettanten und stehen im Geruch der Meisterschaft. Wie aber, wenn wir unsere Erfolge verachteten, wie, wenn wir ganz von vorne begännen die Arbeit der Liebe zu lernen, die immer für uns getan worden ist? Wie, wenn wir hingingen und Anfänger würden, nun, da sich vieles verändert.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“I would finally just like to advise you to grow through your development quietly and seriously; you can interrupt it in no more violent manner than by looking outwards, and expecting answer from outside to questions which perhaps only your innermost feeling in your most silent hour can answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Being dead filled her beyond fulfillment. Like a fruit
suffused with its own mystery and sweetness,
she was filled with her vast death, which was so new,
she could not understand that it had happened.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Préfères-tu, rose, être l'ardente compagne
de nos transports présents?
Est-ce les souvenir qui davantage te gagne
lorsqu'un bonheur se reprend?

Tant de fois je t'ai vue, heureuse et sèche,
- chaque pétale un linceul -
dans un coffret odorant, à côté d'une mèche,
ou dans un livre aimé qu'on relira seul.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke

“But this press of time—take it as a little thing next to what endures. All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Truly being here is glorious.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I want to mirror your image in its fullest perfection. Never be blind or too old to uphold your weighty wavering reflection”
― Rainer-Maria Rilke

“Nothing could be less conducive to reaching an art-work than critical remarks:it's always simply a matter of more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Everything cannot be so easily grasped and conveyed as we are generally led to believe; most events are unconveyable and come to pass in a space that no word has ever penetrated; more unconveyable than all else are art-works, whose mysterious existences, whose lives run alongside ours, which perishes, whereas theirs endure.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“You, still the squanderers of the empty hall —
when the twilight comes, wide as woods…
And the chandelier, like a sixteen-pointer, vaults
where nothing can set foot.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“No waiting the beyond, no peering toward it,
but longing to degrade not even death;
we shall learn earthliness, and serve its ends,
to feel its hands about us like a friend's.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours

“There exists only one aloneness, and it is great, and it is not easy to bear. To nearly everyone come those hours that we would gladly exchange for any cheap or even the most banal camaraderie, for even the slightest inclination to choose the second-best or the most unworthy thing. But perhaps it is exactly in those hours when aloneness can flourish.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet