Rainer Maria Rilke > Quotes

“The longer i live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed into magnificent sense.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

“Yes — the springtime needed you. Often a star
was waiting for you to notice it.

(Ja, die Frühlinge brauchten dich wohl. Es muteten manche
Stirme dir zu, dass du sie spürtest.)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Because he loves only as man, not as human being, there is in his sexual feelings something narrow, seemingly wild, malicious, temporal, finite, which weakens his art and makes it equivocal and dubious.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“No one would dream of expecting a single individual to be "happy"—once someone is married, however, everyone is very astonished when he is not happy!”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

“Early this morning I read about your autumn, and all the colors you brought into your letter were changed back in my feelings and filled my mind to the brim with strength and radiance.
Yesterday, while I was admiring the dissolving brightness of autumn here, you were walking through that other autumn back home, which is painted on red wood, as this one’s painted on silk.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne

“En une seule fleur
Enchantée de cet artifice,
ton abondance l’avait osé.

Tu étais assez riche, pour devenir cent
fois toi-même en une seule fleur;
c’est l’état de celui qui aime
Mais tu n’as pas pensé ailleurs.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke

“I am so glad you are here. It makes me realize how beautiful my world is.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“If you hold close to nature, to what is simple in it, to the small things people hardly see and which all of a sudden can become great and immeasurable; if you have this love for what is slight, and quite unassumingly, as a servant, seek to win the confidence of what seems poor – then everything will grow easier, more unified and somehow more conciliatory, not perhaps in the intellect, which, amazed, remains a step behind, but in your deepest consciousness, watchfulness and knowledge.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Why should you want to exclude from your life all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit, when you don’t know what work it is these states are performing within you?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Beauty will become paltry and insignificant when one looks for it only in what is pleasing; there it might be found occasionally but it resides and lies awake in each thing where it encloses itself, and it emerges only for the individual who believes that it is present everywhere and who will not move on until he has stubbornly coaxed it forth.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“We are unutterably alone, essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important to us.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! –
powers and people –

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Don't petals of soft words float upon your blood?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Attempt to raise the sunken sensations of this distant past; your self will become the stronger for it, your loneliness will open up and become a twilit dwelling in which the noise other people make is only heard far off. And if from this turn inwards, from this submersion in your own world, there come verses, then it will not occur to you to ask anyone whether they are good verses. Nor will you attempt to interest magazines in these bits of work: for in them you will see your beloved natural possessions, a piece, and a voice, of your life.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Wenn du der Träumer bist,
Bin ich dein traum.
Doch wenn du wachen willst,
Bin ich dein Wille.
Und werde mächtig aller Herrlichkeit
Und ründe mich wie eine sternenstille
Über der wunderlichen Stadt der Zeit”
― R.M. Rilke

“It is true that many young people who wrongly, that is, simply with abandon and unsolitarily, feel the oppressiveness of a failure and want to make the situation in which they have landed viable and fruitful in their own personal way—; for their nature tells them that, less even than all else that is important, can questions of love be solved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case demand a new, special, only personal answer—: but how should they, who have already flung themselves together and no longer mark off and distinguish themselves from each other, who therefore no longer possess anything of their own selves, be able to find a way out of themselves, out of the depth of their already shattered solitude?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Nous sommes en avant tout à fait comme des nostalgies. C'est au loin, dans des arrière-plans éclatants, qu'ont lieu nos épanouissements. C'est là que sont mouvement et volonté. C'est là que se situent les histoires dont nous sommes des titres obscurs. C'est là qu'ont lieu nos accords, nos adieux, consolation et deuil. C'est là que nous sommes, alors qu'au premier plan nous allons et venons.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Notes sur la mélodie des choses

“The Solitary

As one who has sailed across an unknown sea,
among this rooted folk I am alone;
the full days on their tables are their own,
to me the distant is reality.

A new world reaches to my very eyes,
a place perhaps unpeopled as the moon;
their slightest feelings they must analyze,
and all their words have got the common tune.

The things I brought with me from far away,
compared with theirs, look strangely not the same:
in their great country they were living things,
but here they hold their breath, as if for shame.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“La solitude qui enveloppe les oeuvres d'art est infinie, etil n'estrien qui permette de moins les atteindre que la critique. Seul l'amour peut les appréhender, les saisir et faire preuve de justesse à leur endroit:”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Lettres à un jeune poète de Rainer Maria Rilke

“Death is great.
We are his completely
with laughing eyes.
When we feel ourselves immersed in life,
he dares to weep
immersed in us.

(Der Tod ist groß.
Wir sind die Seinen
lachenden Munds.
Wenn wir uns mitten im Leben meinen,
wagt er zu weinen
mitten in uns.)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“To retreat into oneself and meet nobody for hours on end—that is what one must be able to attain. To be alone, as one was alone as a child, when the grown-ups walked about involved in things which seemed great and important, because big people looked so busy and because one could comprehend nothing of their doings. And when one day one realises that their affairs are paltry, their professions benumbed and no longer connected with life, why not still like a child look upon them as something strange from without the depth of one's own world, regarding them from the immunity of one's own loneliness, which is itself work, position and profession? Why desire to exchange a child's wise incomprehension for self-defence and disdain? Incomprehension is loneliness, but self-defence and disdain are participation in that from which one is trying to separate oneself by these means.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Now it was there. Now it was growing within me like a tumor, like a second head, and it was a part of me, though it surely could not be mine, since it was so big. There it was, like a big dead animal that had once been my hand when it was still alive, or my arm. And my blood was flowing through me, and through it, as if through one and the same body. And my heart was having to make a great effort to pump the blood into the big thing: there was very nearly not enough blood. And the blood was loth to pass in, and emerged sick and tainted. But the big thing swelled and grew before my face, like a warm, bluish boil, and grew before my mouth, and already its margin cast a shadow on my remaining eye.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“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 clam 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

“And children are still the way you were ...as a child, sad and happy in just the same way and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value.”
― Rilke Letters to a Young Poet

“I believe in old age; to work and to grow old: this is what life expects of us. And then one day to be old and still be quite far from understanding everything - no, but to begin, but to love, but to suspect, but to be connected to what is remote and inexpressible, all the way up into the stars. (Letters on Life)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“In this vast night, be the magic power
at your senses’ intersection,
the meaning of their strange encounter.

And if the earthly has forgotten
you, say to the still earth: I flow.
To the rushing water speak: I am.

from “Sonnet 29”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus

“À travers nous s'envolent
Les oiseaux en silence. O, moi qui veux grandir
Je regarde au dehors, et l'arbre en moi grandit.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“T'appuyant, fraîche claire
rose, contre mon oeil fermé -,
on dirait mille paupières
superposées
contre la mienne chaude.
Mille sommeils contre ma feinte
sous laquelle je rôde
dans l'odorant labyrinthe.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke