Rainer Maria Rilke > Quotes

“Do not watch yourself too closely. Do not draw over-rapid conclusions from what is happening to you. Simply let it happen. Otherwise you will too readily find yourself looking on your past, which is of course not uninvolved with everything that is going on in you now, reproachfully (that is, moralistically). <...> The extraordinary circumstances of a solitary and helpless childhood are so difficult, so complicated, exposed to so many influences and at the same time removed from any real life context, that if a vice enters into it we must not be too quick to call it a vice. We should in general be very careful with names; it is so often the name of a crime which destroys a life, not the nameless and personal act itself, which was perhaps completely necessary to that life and could have been absorbed by it without difficulty.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Bodily delight is a sense experience, just like pure seeing or the pure feeling with which a lovely fruit fills the tongue; it is a great boundless experience which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the splendour of all knowing. Our acceptance of it is not bad; what is bad is that almost all men misuse and squander this experience, and apply it as a stimulus to the weary places of their life, a dissipation instead of a rallying for the heights. Mankind have turned eating, too, into something else: want on the one hand, and superfluity on the other, have dulled the clarity of this need, and all those deep, simple necessities by which life renews itself have become similarly dull.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“And if there is one thing more that I must say to you, it is this: Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Sana daha önce söylemiş miydim? Görmeyi öğreniyorum. Evet, yeni başladım. Henüz pek o kadar iyi değil ama elimden geleni yapacağım.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“It is a blessed moment of inner life when one decides or resolves from now on to love with all one’s strength and unflinchingly that which one fears the most, that which has made us—according to our own measure—suffer too much. Don’t you believe that once such a decision has been made, the word “separation” is nothing but a name stripped of all meaning,”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters for the Grieving Heart

“But your solitude, even in the midst of quite foreign circumstances, will be a hold and a home for you, and leading from it you will find all the paths you need.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“We are unspeakably alone.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“This isn't how sickness was in childhood. A postponement. An excuse to grow up.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams

“I have faith in nights.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“The loss that now casts its deep shadow over you is also a task to endure and a matter of coming to terms with all of the suffering that may befall us—for once the mother leaves us, we lose all protection. You have to undergo the terrible process of becoming more resilient. But in return... (and you have also begun to feel this already) in return the power of protection now becomes yours, and all the gentleness which until now you had been able to receive will blossom more and more inside of you into your new capacity to share it as something—inherited and acquired unspeakably, at the deepest price—of your own.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“Even when the lights go out, even when someone says to me: "It's over---," even when from the stage a gray gust of emptiness drifts toward me,
even when not one silent ancestor sits beside me anymore---not a woman, not even the boy with the brown squint-eye:
I'll sit here anyway. One can always watch.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“I’m learning how to see. I don’t know what the reason is, but everything enters into me more deeply and no longer stops at the point where it used to come to an end. I have an inner self that I knew nothing about. Now everything goes into it. I don’t know what happens there.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“My God, if any of it could be shared! But would it "be" then, would it "be"? No, it "is" only at the price of solitude.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“The comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead of possession one learns connection.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Num casal há sempre um que que é o guardião da solidão do outro.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Perfection’s firsts, creation’s pampered favourites, the peaks and summits we look to where they redden in the first touch of the created world – spilt pollen of flowering Godhead, knots of light, passageways, stairs, thrones, spaces of life, the blazoned shields of bliss, tumults of ecstasy and as suddenly, solely – mirrors, scooping up that flood of beauty that pours from them and re-directing it back into themselves. For we, even as we feel, evaporate in the act of breathing ourselves out and beyond, ember after ember, we burn away to nothing. We give off an ever-diminishing scent. Though somebody might come and say, ‘Yes! You are in my blood now. This room, the whole of spring is full of your presence . . .’ What’s the use? He cannot preserve us. We still disappear in him or around him. Even the truly beautiful – who holds them? Nothing but appearance”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“I have by now grown accustomed, to the degree that this is humanly possible, to grasp everything that we may encounter according to its particular intensity without worrying much about how long it will last. Ultimately, this may be the best and most direct way of expecting the utmost of everything—even its duration. If we allow an encounter with a given thing to be shaped by this expectation that it may last, every such experience will be spoiled and falsified, and ultimately it will be prevented from unfolding its most proper and authentic potential and fertility. All the things that cannot be gained through our pleading can be given to us only as something unexpected, something extra: this is why I am yet again confirmed in my belief that often nothing seems to matter in life but the longest patience.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“We say release, and radiance, and roses,”

We say release, and radiance, and roses,
and echo upon everything that's known;
and yet, behind the world our names enclose is
the nameless: our true archetype and home.

The sun seems male, and earth is like a woman,
the field is humble, and the forest proud;
but over everything we say, inhuman,
moves the forever-undetermined god.

We grow up; but the world remains a child.
Star and flower, in silence, watch us go.
And sometimes we appear to be the final
exam they must succeed on. And they do.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose

“Angels often do now know whether they walk among the dead or living.”
― Rilke, Rainer Maria

“Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“El amor de un ser humano por otro, es posiblemente la prueba más difícil para cada uno de nosotros.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“She followed slowly and she needed time,
as though some long ascent were not yet by;
and yet: as though, when she had ceased to climb,
she would no longer merely walk, but fly.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Tutto è portare a termine e poi generare. Lasciar compiersi ogni impressione e ogni germe d’un sentimento dentro di sé, nel buio, nell’indicibile, nell’inconscio irraggiungibile alla propria ragione, e attendere con profonda umiltà e pazienza l’ora del parto d’una nuova chiarezza: questo solo si chiama vivere da artista: nel comprender come nel creare.
Qui non si misura il tempo, qui non vale alcun termine e dieci anni son nulla. Essere artisti vuol dire: non calcolare e contare; maturare come l’albero, che non incalza i suoi succhi e sta sereno nelle tempeste di primavera senz’apprensione che l’estate non possa venire. Ché l’estate viene. Ma viene solo ai pazienti, che attendono e stanno come se l’eternità giacesse avanti a loro, tanto sono tranquilli e vasti e sgombri d’ogni ansia. Io l’imparo ogni giorno, l’imparo tra i dolori, cui sono riconoscente: pazienza è tutto!”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Strange / to wish wishes no longer. / Strange / to see things / that seemed to / belong together / floating in every / direction.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Jubilation knows and Longing grants —
only Lament still learns; with girlish hands
she counts the ancient evil through the nights.

But suddenly, unpracticed and askant,
she lifts one of our voice’s constellations
Into the sky unclouded by her breath.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Since I’ve learned to be silent, everything has come so much closer to me.”
― Ranier Maria Rilke

“Rose, toute ardente et pourtant claire,
que l'on devrait nommer reliquaire
de Sainte-Rose ..., rose qui distribue
cette troublante odeur de sainte nue.

Rose plus jamais tentée, déconcertante
de son interne paix; ultime amante,
si loin d'Ève, de sa première alerte -,
rose qui infiniment possède la perte.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke