Rainer Maria Rilke > Quotes

“perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Tout ici chante la vie de naguère,
non pas dans un sens qui détruit le lendemain;
on devine, vaillants, dans leur force première
le ciel et le vent, et la main et le pain.

Ce n'est point un hier qui partout se propage
arrêtant à jamais ces anciens contours :
c'est la terre contente de son image
et qui consent à son premier jour.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Vergers, et autres poèmes français

“Cum aş putea să mi-l mai ţin în mine sufletul când mi-l mângâi tu?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“When one speaks of solitaries, one always takes too much for granted. One supposes that people know what one is talking about. No, they do not. They have never seen a solitary, they have simply hated him without knowing him. They have been his neighbors who used him up, and the voices in the next room that tempted him. They have incited things against him, so that they made a great noise and drowned him out. Children were in league against him, when he was tender and a child, and with every growth he grew up against the grown-ups. They tracked him to his hiding place, like a beast to be hunted, and his long youth had no closed season. And when he refused to be worn out and got away, they cried out upon that which emanated from him, and called it ugly and cast suspicion upon it. And when he would not listen, they became more distinct and ate away his food and breathed out his air and spat into his poverty so that it became repugnant to him. They brought down disrepute upon him as upon an infectious person and cast stones at him to make him go away more quickly. And they were right in their ancient instinct: for he was indeed their foe.

But then, when he did not raise his eyes, they began to reflect. They suspected that with all this they had done what he wanted; that they had fortified him in his solitude and helped him to separate himself from them for ever. And now they changed about and, resorting to the final, the extreme, used that other resistance: fame. And at this clamor almost every one has looked up and been distracted.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and to try to cherish”
― Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Is it not peculiar that nearly all of the great philosophers and psychologists have always paid attention to the earth and nothing but the earth? Would it not be more sublime to lift our eyes from this crumb, and instead of considering a speck of dust in the universe, to turn our attention to space itself?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“As one puts a handkerchief before pent-in-breath-
no: as one presses it against a wound
out of which the whole of life, in a single gush,
wants to stream, I held you to me: I saw you
turn red from me. How could anyone express
what took place between us? We made up for everything
there was never time for. I matured strangely
in every impulse of unperformed youth,
and you, love, had wildest childhood over my heart…”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Call me to you when the hour turns away,
The one which always opposes you:
It is as close to you as a dog’s face
But then it wavers, forever eluding you”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“You are so young, all still lies ahead of you, and I should like to ask you, as best I can, dear Sir, to be patient towards 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 foreign tongue. Do not not strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“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”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I come home from the soaring
In which I lost myself.
I was song, and the refrain which is God
Is still roaring in my ears.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams

“Art means to be oblivious to the fact that the world already exists and to create one.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life: New Prose Translations

“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, Letters to a Young Poet

“Forschen Sie jetzt nicht nach den Antworten, die Ihnen nicht gegeben werden können, weil Sie sie 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 Antwort hinein.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Das Kunstwerk möchte man also erklären: als ein tiefinneres Geständnis, das unter dem Vorwand einer Erinnerung, einer Erfahrung oder eines Ereignisses sich ausgiebt und, losgelöst von seinem Urheber, allein bestehen kann.
Diese Selbständigkeit des Kunstwerkes ist die Schönheit. Mit jedem Kunstwerke kommt ein Neues, ein Ding mehr in die Welt.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“You run like a herd of luminous deer,
and I am dark,
I am forest.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“To be an artist means: not to reckon and count; to ripen like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of Spring without fear lest no Summer might come after.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“It is difficult to unlearn a lifetime of habitability and then to comprehend suddenly to unfamiliar, strange, even marvellous things. To allow for surprise and improvisation is to begin the apprenticeship of learning the way that is no way.”
― Rainier Maria Rilke

“For your sake poets sequester themselves,
gather images to churn the mind,
journey forth, ripening with metaphor,
and all their lives they are so alone...

And painters paint their pictures only
that the world, so transient as you made it,
can be given back to you,
to last forever.

All becomes eternal. See: In the Mona Lisa
some woman has long since ripened like wine,
and the enduring feminine is held there
through all the ages.

Those who create are like you.
They long for the eternal.
They say, Stone, be forever!
And that means: be yours.

And lovers also gather your inheritance.
They are the poets of one brief hour.
They kiss an expressionless mouth into a smile
as if creating it anew, more beautiful.

Awakening desire, they make a place
where pain can enter;
that’s how growing happens.
They bring suffering along with their laughter,
and longings that had slept and now awaken
to weep in a stranger’s arms.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“As for myself, what has died for me has died, so to speak, into my own heart: when I looked for him, the person who vanished has collected himself strangely and so surprisingly in me, and it was so moving to feel he was now only there that my enthusiasm for serving his new existence, for deepening and glorifying it, took the upper hand almost at the very moment when pain would otherwise have invaded and devastated the whole landscape of my spirit. When I remember how I—often with the utmost difficulty in understanding and accepting each other—loved my father! Often, in childhood, my mind became confused and my heart grew numb at the mere thought that someday he might no longer be; my existence seemed to me so wholly conditioned through him (my existence, which from the start was pointed in such a different direction!) that his departure was to my innermost self synonymous with my own destruction …, but so deeply is death rooted in the essence of love that (if only we are cognizant of death without letting ourselves be misled by the uglinesses and suspicions that have been attached to it) it nowhere contradicts love: where, after all, can it drive out someone whom we have carried unsayably in our heart except into this very heart, where would the “idea” of this loved being exist, and his unceasing influence (: for how could that cease which even while he lived with us was more and more independent of his tangible presence) … where would this always secret influence be more secure than in us?! Where can we come closer to it, where more purely celebrate it, when obey it better, than when it appears combined with our own voices, as if our heart had learned a new language, a new song, a new strength!

(To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, January 6, 1923)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“You are so young, all still lies ahead of you, and I should like to ask you, as best I can, dear Sir, to be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke , Letters to a Young Poet

“If it were possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and a little beyond the outworks of our intuitions, perhaps we should then bear our sadnesses with greater assurance than our joys. For they are the moments when something new enters into us, something unknown to us; our feelings, shy and inhibited, fall silent, everything in us withdraws, a stillness settles on us, and at the centre of it is the new presence that nobody yet knows, making no sound.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Sometimes, in the rue de Seine for instance, I go past little shops. Vendors of second-hand goods, or small-time antiquarian booksellers, or dealers in engravings, all of them with overcrowded windows. No one ever goes inside them, they don’t look as if they do any business. But look inside and you can see them sitting there and reading, completely at ease, with no thought to the morrow, or of making a success of things; they have a dog that sits cheerfully by their feet, or a cat that makes the silence even greater as it brushes along the rows of books as if it were wiping the names off the spines. Ah, if only that would do: sometimes I could wish I could buy myself a crowded shop-window like that and sit down behind it with a dog for twenty years.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Oh Malte, we just go on living, and it seems to me that everyone is distracted and busy and no one pays proper attention as we go along. As if a meteor were to fall and no one sees it and no one has made a wish. Never forget to wish for something, Malte.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Things are not all as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe; most events are unsayable, occur in a space that no word has ever penetrated, and most unsayable of all are works of art, mysterious existences whose life endures alongside ours, which passes away.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Here is no thoroughly mature and clean sex world, but one that is not sufficiently human, that is only male, is heat, intoxication and restlessness, and laden with the old prejudices and arrogances with which man has disfigured and burdened love. Because he loves as man only, not as human being, for this reason there is in his sexual feeling something narrow, seeming wild, spiteful, time-bound, uneternal, that diminishes his art and makes it ambiguous and doubtful.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

“Along the sun-drenched roadside, from the great
hollow half-treetrunk, which for generations
has been a trough, renewing in itself
an inch or two of rain, I satisfy
my thirst: taking the water's pristine coolness
into my whole body through my wrists.
Drinking would be too powerful, too clear;
but this unhurried gesture of restraint
fills my whole consciousness with shining water.

Thus, if you came, I could be satisfied
to let my hand rest lightly, for a moment,
lightly, upon your shoulder or your breast.


- Along The Sun-Drenched Roadside, Translated by Stephen Mitchell”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Señor, ya es tiempo. Grande ha sido el verano.
Tiende tu sombra sobre los relojes
de sol, y desata los vientos por el campo.
Haz madurar las frutas más tardías,
dales dos días más de sur,
fuérzales a acabar, y echa
el último dulzor al vino recio.
Quien ya no tiene casa, no la construirá.
Quien ahora está solo, lo estará mucho tiempo.
Velará, leerá, escribirá largas cartas
e irá por los paseos, deambulando
de un lado a otro, mientras las hojas caen.”
― Rainer María Rilke, The Book of Images