Rainer Maria Rilke > Quotes

“That your world is in agony is no reason to turn your back on it, or to try to escape into private “spiritual” pursuits. Rilke reminded me that I had the strength and courage to walk out into the world as into my own heart, and to “love the things / as no one has thought to love them” (I, 61).”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“The main thing was to be living. That was the main thing.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“The Letters to a young poet illustrate perfectly the kindliness, the complexity, and at the same time the impersonality and remoteness of Rilke’s manner with unknown correspondents.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Pues en cuanto consideramos la existencia de cada individuo como una habitación mayor o menor, queda de manifiesto que los más sólo llegan a conocer apenas un rincón de su aposento. Un sitio junto a la ventana. O bien alguna estrecha faja del entarimado, que van y vienen recorriendo de un lado para otro. Así disfrutan de alguna seguridad…”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Doch wie ich mich auch in mich selber neige: Mein Gott ist dunkel und wie ein Gewebe von hundert Wurzeln, welche schweigsam trinken.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Das Stunden-Buch

“for at bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I do not really know whether I have survived. My inner self has shut itself up more and more. As though to protect itself, it has become inaccessible even to me.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Co to było - ten płomień, ten niekończący się brak, to słodkie, głębokie, promieniujące uczucie zbierających się łez? Co to było?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Even on days when fate wishes to bestow boundless gifts on them, most people make mistakes in accepting: they don’t accept straightforwardly and consequently lose something while doing so, they take with a secondary purpose in mind, or they accept what is given to them as if they were being compensated for something else.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“Your inmost happening is worth your whole love, that is what you must somehow work at, and not lose too much time and too much courage in explaining”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Lauschende Wolke über dem Wald.
Wie wir sie lieben lernten,
seit wir wissen, wie wunderbald
sie als weckender Regen prallt
an die träumenden Ernten.”
― Rilke, Rainer Maria

“but there is a great deal of beauty here, because there is beauty everywhere.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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

“And surely of all the stars that perished
long ago,
one still exists.
I think that I know
which one it is--
which one, at the end of its beam in the sky,
stands like a white city . . .”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“think: the hero prolongs himself, even his falling
was only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. 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? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where it all comes from and where it is leading? You well know you are in a period of transition and want nothing more than to be transformed. If there is something ailing in the way you go about things, then remember that sickness is the means by which an organism rids itself of something foreign to it. All one has to do is help it to be ill, to have its whole illness and let it break out, for that is how it mends itself. There is so much, my dear Mr Kappus, going on in you now. You must be patient as an invalid and trusting as a convalescent, for you are perhaps both. 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. And inasfar as you are your own doctor, this above all is what you must do now.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Eines ist, die Geliebte zu singen. Ein anderes, wehe,
jenen verborgenen schuldigen Fluß-Gott des Bluts.”
― Rilke, Rainer Maria

“The translation is designedly very literal, and the nature of German prose is such that an English rendering which aims—as this does—at close correspondence rather than happy paraphrase, can hardly avoid displaying at times a certain stiffness in the joints; but I have thought it right to reproduce Rilke’s oddities of expression and punctuation, which are no less curious in the original than they must seem here; and never to succumb to the temptation to write pretty-sounding English just because it is a poet that speaks. Rilke is a master of the unlikely, but poetically true, word; and a cunning employer of alliteration, personification, and hypallage.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I circle for millennia, around God, around the ancient tower, 
  and still do not know: am I hawk, a storm, or a great song?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you — no one”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Irony: don’t let yourself be ruled by it, especially not in uncreative moments. In creative ones try to make use of it as one means among many to get a grasp on life. Used purely, it too is pure, and there is no need to be ashamed of it; and if you feel too familiar with it, if you fear your intimacy is growing too much, then turn towards great and serious subjects, next to which irony becomes small and helpless. Seek out the depths of things: irony will never reach down there – and if in so doing you come up against something truly great, inquire whether this way of relating to things originates in a necessary part of your being.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“C'est toi qui prépares en toi
plus que toi, ton ultime essence.
Ce qui sort de toi, ton ultime essence.
Ce qui sort de toi, ce troublant émoi,
c'est ta danse.

Chaque pétale consent
et fait dans le vent
quelques pas odorants
invisibles.

Ô musiques des yeux,
toute entourée d'eux,
tu deviens au milieu
intangible.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke

“I have my dead, and I have let them go,
and was amazed to see them so contented,
so soon at home in being dead, so cheerful,
so unlike their reputation. Only you
return, brush past me, loiter, try to knock
against something, so that the sound reveals
your presence. Oh don't take from me what I
am slowly learning. I am sure you have gone astray
if you are moved to homesickness for anything
in this dimension.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Učim da gledam. Ne znam razloga tome, ali sve u mene ulazi dublje i ne zaustavlja se na onom mestu na kojem se inače uvek okončavalo. U mom biću postoji neka unutrašnjost o kojoj ništa nisam znao. Sve sad odlazi tamo. Ne znam šta se onde zbiva.”
― Rilke Rainer-Maria Zapisi Maltea Lauridsa Brigea

“Oh trees of life, when will your winter come?
We're not in tune. Not like migratory birds.
Outmoded, late, in haste, we force ourselves on winds
which let us down upon indifferent ponds.
Though we've had to learn how flowering is fading,
somewhere lions still roam,
unaware, in their majesty, of any weakness.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from the “Fourth Elegy,” Duino Elegies. Trans. by David Young. (W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition, June 17, 2006) Originally published 1923.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“Go to the limits of your longing
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“You have to live within yourself and think of all of life, all of its millions of possibilities, openings, and futures in relation to which there exists nothing that is past or has been lost. (Letters on Life)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Tokom noći, ustajao sam da bih potražio svoju omiljenu Bodlerovu knjigu, male pesme u prozi, i glasno sam čitao najlepšu od njih U osvit. Znač li je ? Počinje ovako : Najzad sam ! Nema više tandrkanja okasnelih i satrvenih fijakera. Ako ne i počinka, nekoliko časova ćemo imati tišinu. Najzad je iščezla tiranija ljudskog lica, i ostaće mi jedino da podnosim bolo d sebe. A završava se grandiozno, uzdiže se, uspravan, i okončava kao molitva; istinska molitva, veoma jednostavna, izvedena rukama, nespretna i lepa kao molitva nekog Rusa. – Priličan put je imao da pređe da bi dospeo do tog cilja, Bodler, i prešao ga je na kolenima. Koliko god bio daleko od mene, jedno od bića koja su mi najviše strana – često nisam kadar da ga razumem – pokatkad, ipak, u dubini noći, dok bih ponavljao njegove stihove poput deteta, on je bio moj bližnji, moj smoždeni sused, osluškujući, prislonjen uz tanku pregradu, kako moj glas jenjava. Tada je među nama postojala neka neobična veza, totalna deoba, jednako siromaštvo i, možda, jednaki strah.”
― Rajner Marija Rilke

“Der Abend ist mein Buch

Der Abend ist mein Buch. Ihm prangen
die Deckel purpurn in Damast;
ich löse seine goldnen Spangen
mit kühlen Händen, ohne Hast.

Und lese seine erste Seite,
beglückt durch den vertrauten Ton, -
und lese leiser seine zweite,
und seine dritte träum ich schon.”
― Rilke