Rainer Maria Rilke > Quotes

“Избягвайте да подхранвате драмата, която винаги се разиграва между родители и деца…”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Писма до един млад поет / Писма до една млада жена / Райнер Мария Рилке – Марина Цветаева: кореспонденция

“Who was this woman who lived for other people and yet, beneath everything and without knowing or admitting to it, harbored the demands of an entire life within her as if they had been left there entirely touched, so that one could often get the idea that she was also the opposite of what she wanted to be, and that both of these states would be equally true and equally unreal?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“Somehow I had a premonition of what I so often felt at later times: that you did not have the right to open a single book unless you engaged to read them all. With every line you read, you were breaking off a portion of the world. Before books, the world was intact, and afterwards it might be restored to wholeness once again. But how was I, who could not read, to take up the challenge laid down by all of them?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“I know of no other advice than this: Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”


― Rainer Maria Rilke, Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“You are looking outward, which, now above all, you should not do. No one can advise and assist you, no one. There is only one way: go into yourself.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far beyond the road I have begun,
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has an inner light, even from a distance

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

- A Walk”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“I believe that love remains so strong and powerful in your memory because it was your first deep experience of solitariness and the first inner work that you undertook on your life.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Is it possible that despite our inventions and progress, despite our culture, religion and knowledge of the world, we have remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that even that surface, which might still have been something, has been covered with unbelievably boring material, leaving it looking like drawing-room furniture in the summer holidays.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Moja borba, Lu, i opasnost koja se nadvija nada mnom sastoje se u tome da ne mogu da postanem realan, da uvek postoje stvari koje me nište, događaji koji me gaze, realniji od mene, kao da ne postojim ... Jedino tokom dana kad radim (veoma retkih) postajem realan, postojim, zauzimam prostor poput neke stvari, imam težinu, padam, a zatim se neka ruka ispruža i podiže me. Ugrađen u zdanje velike realnosti, imam tada osećaj da sam noseći element, postavljen na duboke temelje, uokviren sa desne i leve strane drugim nosećim elementima. Ali, svaki put, posle tih trenutaka ugrađivanja, ponovo bivam kamen daleko odbačen, inertan poput travke. A činjenica da se ti trenuci odbacivanja nikako ne proređuju, več bivaju, naprotiv, sve stalniji, zar ne bi trebalo da me plaši ? Počivam li tako, potpuno onemoćao, ko če me naći ispod svega toga što me pokriva ? I nije li moguće da sam ja već odavno pretvoren u prah, gotovo nalik zemlji, gotovo izravnan s tlom, i to tako dobro da već preko mene prelazi neki sumorni drum ?”
― Rajner Marija Rilke

“Then take your fate upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking for that reward which might come from without. 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

“In writing poetry, one is always aided and even carried away by the rhythm of exterior things: for the lyric cadence is that of nature: of the waters, the wind, the night.

But to write rhythmic prose one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous and multiple rhythm of the blood.

Prose needs to be built like a cathedral: there one is truly without a name, without ambition, without help: on scaffoldings, alone with one's consciousness.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“You needed your whole self; and so you went and broke yourself, out of its grip, in pieces,painfully, because your need was great.”
― Ranier Maria Rilke

“And more than that: you are also the doctor responsible for looking after himself. But with all illnesses there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“May I strike my heart's keys clearly, and may none fail because of slack, uncertain, or fraying strings. May the tears that stream down my face make me more radiant: may my hidden weeping bloom.... How we waste our afflictions!... [T]hey're really our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one of the seasons of the clandestine year—; not only a season—: they're site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Albert Einstein once wrote that 'as far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Dance the orange.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“It should either have passed away with my childhood, or my childhood should have flowed away from it later, leaving it behind, real among all the rest of reality, something to see and objectively tell, like a thing in Cezanne, incomprehensible for all I care, but tangible.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne

“One should wait, and gather meaning and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, at the very end, one might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For verses are not feelings, as people imagine – those one has early enough; they are experiences. In order to write a single line, one must see a great many cities, people and things, have an understanding of animals, sense how it is to be a bird in flight, and know the manner in which the little flowers open every morning. In one's mind there must be regions unknown, meetings unexpected and long-anticipated partings, to which one can cast back one's thoughts – childhood days that still retain their mystery, parents inevitably hurt when one failed to grasp the pleasure they offered (and which another would have taken pleasure in), childhood illnesses beginning so strangely with so many profound and intractable transformations, days in peacefully secluded rooms and mornings beside the sea, and the sea itself, seas, nights on journeys that swept by on high and flew past filled with stars – and still it is not enough to be able to bring all this to mind. One must have memories of many nights of love, no two alike; of the screams of women in labour; and of pale, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been with the dying, have sat in a room with the dead with the window open and noises coming in at random. And it is not yet enough to have memories. One has to be able to forget them, if there are a great many, and one must have great patience, to wait for their return. For it is not the memories in themselves that are of consequence. Only when they are become the very blood within us, our every look and gesture, nameless and no longer distinguishable from our inmost self, only then, in the rarest of hours, can the first word of a poem arise in their midst and go out from among them. ”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“You are so young; you stand before beginnings. I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“KLAGE O wie ist alles fern und lange vergangen. Ich glaube, der Stern, von welchem ich Glanz empfange, ist seit Jahrtausenden tot. Ich glaube, im Boot, das vorüberfuhr, hörte ich etwas Banges sagen. Im Hause hat eine Uhr geschlagen … In welchem Haus? … Ich möchte aus meinem Herzen hinaus unter den großen Himmel treten. Ich möchte beten. Und einer von allen Sternen müßte wirklich noch sein. Ich glaube, ich wüßte, welcher allein gedauert hat,— welcher wie eine weiße Stadt am Ende des Strahls in den Himmeln steht …”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“we don’t love like the flowers, with just
the force of a single year; when we love,
ancient sap is rising.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“All that we have gained, the machine threatens-
once a tool assumes a force of its own.
Instead of letting us get used to mastery, for buildings more severe it cuts the stone.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“These things cannot be measured by time, a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen 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. It will come. But it comes only to those who”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“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 cog- nizance. You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living; train yourself to it--but take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your inmost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Yalnızlardan söz etmemiz insanlardan fazla anlayış beklemektir. İnsanlar, neden söz ettiğimizi anlarlar sanıyoruz. Hayır, anlamazlar. Bir yanlızı görmemişlerdir asla; ondan, tanımaksızın nefret etmişlerdir yalnızca. İnsanlar, onu tüketen komşular olmuşlardır; bitişik odanın, onu baştan çıkaran sesleri olmuşlardır. İnsanlar, patırtı etsinler, onun sesini boğsunlar diye, eşyaları ona karşı kışkırtmışlardır. Narinliği ve çocuk oluşu yüzünden çocuklar, ona karşı birleşmişler ve o her büyüyüşünde, yetişkinlerin inadına büyümüştür. Bir av hayvanı gibi barınağını sezmişler ve uzun gençliği sürekli bir takip altında geçmiştir. Güçten kesilmeyip de ellerinden kaçtıkça, yaptığı şeylere bağırmışlar, çirkin deyip kötülemişlerdir yaptıklarını. Ve o, bunlara kulak asmadı mı biraz daha ortaya çıkmışlar, yiyeceğini bitirmişler, teneffüs edeceği havayı tüketmişler ve iğrensin diye yoksulluğuna tükürmüşlerdir. Bulaşıcı hastalığı olan biri gibi adını kötüye çıkarmışlar, daha çabuk kaçıp gitsin diye ardından taşlar atmışlardır. Ve yıllanmış içgüdülerinde haklıydılar gerçekten: O, gerçekten düşmanlarıydı çünkü.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“There exist relationships that must amount to a very great and almost unbearable happiness, but they can take place only between people blessed with abundance and between individuals each one of whom is rich, focused, and mindful; they can be united only by two expansive, deep, and individual worlds.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life: New Prose Translations

“Temples are no longer known. It is we who secretly save up
these extravagances of the heart. Where one of them still
survives,
a Thing that was formerly prayed to, worshipped, knelt
before--
just as it is, it passes into the invisible world.
Many no longer perceive it, yet miss the chance
to build it inside themselves now, with pillars and statues:
greater.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“But if they, the infinitely dead, were awakening an image within us,
see, they would perhaps point to the catkins
hanging from the bare hazels, or
mean the rain pelting the dark earth in spring.—

And we, who think of happiness as
rising, would feel an emotion
that almost startles
when a happy thing falls.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies