Rainer Maria Rilke > Quotes

“Allen diesen Meinungen von Kunst, derjenigen Tolstojs mit eingeschlossen, ist aber Eines gemeinsam: es wird nicht so sehr das Wesen der Kunst betrachtet, vielmehr sind alle bemüht, sie aus ihren Wirkungen zu erklären.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“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

“And your doubt can become a good quality if you teach it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Question it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, as to why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you might find it perplexed and embarrassed, or even protesting. Do not give in, but require arguments, and behave this way, attentively and consistently, every single time, and the day will arrive when out of this destroyer will come to be one of your finest workers—perhaps the most ingenious of them all, that build your life.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Si votre vie quotidienne vous paraît pauvre, ne l'accusez pas; accusez-vous plutôt, dites-vous que vous n'êtes pas assez poète pour en convoquer les richesses.
Pour celui qui crée, il n'y a pas, en effet, de pauvreté ni de lieu indigent, indifférent.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“turn towards nature, and try, like a First Man, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Αν δεν αντιστάθηκα σ’ αυτήν που με αγάπησε, είναι γιατί απ’ όλους τους τρόπους, με τους οποίους μπορεί ένας άνθρωπος να κατακτήσει έναν άλλον, μονάχα ο δικός της ασυγκράτητος, μου φάνηκε δίκαιος. Όντως έτσι όπως είμαι εκτίθεμαι και δεν θέλησα να αποφύγω ούτε και εκείνη. Λαχταρούσα όμως να τη διαπεράσω! Να γίνει παράθυρο για ν’ ατενίζω διευρυμένο το σύμπαν της ύπαρξης”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“There is nothing less apt to touch a work of art than critical words: all we end up with there is more or less felicitous misunderstandings. Things are not all as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe; most events are 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

“If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world's sound - wouldn't you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attention to it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Each time we tackle something with joy, each time we open our eyes toward a yet untouched distance, we transform not only this and the next moment, but we also rearrange and gradually absorb the past inside of us. We dissolve the foreign body of pain of which we know neither its actual consistency and makeup nor how many (perhaps) life-affirming stimuli it imparts, once it has been dissolved, to our blood! Death, especially the most completely felt and experienced death, has never remained an obstacle to life for a surviving individual, because its innermost essence is not contrary to us (as one may occasionally suspect), but it is more knowing about life than we are in our most vital moments. I always think that such a great weight, with its tremendous pressure, somehow has the task of forcing us into a deeper, more intimate layer of life so that we may grow out of it all the more vibrant and fertile. I gained this experience very early on through various circumstances, and it was then confirmed from pain to pain: What is here and now is, after all, what has been given and is expected of us, and we must attempt to transform everything that happens to us into a new familiarity and friendliness with it. For where else should we direct our senses, which after all have been exquisitely designed to grasp and master what is here?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“Why, if our time on earth could be
spent as laurel, its green darker than
all others, its leaves edged with
little waves (like the smile of a wind) —: then why do we
have to be human—and avoiding destiny,
long for destiny? . . .

Oh not because there is happiness,
that rash profit taken just prior to impending loss,
Not out of curiosity, or to give the heart practice,
reasons that would hold for the laurel too . . .

But because being here is so much, and because everything
in this fleeting world seems to need us, and
strangely speaks to us.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“Think, dear sir, of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking what you will; {...} only be attentive to that which rises up in you and set it above everything that you observe about you. What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“So whoever loves must try to act as if he had a great work: he must be much alone and go into himself and collect himself and hold fast to himself; he must work; he must become something!”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“How the bird cry seizes us …
The creation once, of any cry.
But even the children, playing in the open air,
Cry out, beyond all true cries.

Chance cries out. Into the spaces between
All of these vastnesses of a world, (where the broken
Bird cry insinuates itself, like men in dreams -)
They drive and pound in their screeching, like wedges.

So where on earth are we then? We break freer and freer,
Hunting, like kites which have snapped loose
Half way up, with laughing borders,

Shredded by the wind. – Array all those who cry out,
Oh god who sings! that they may awaken with a roar,
Bearing upon them as a current the head and the lyre.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“Suffering is not discerned,
neither has love been learned,
and what removes us in death,
nothing unveils.
Only the song's high breath
hallows and hails.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“Ist dir Trinken bitter, werde Wein.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Ich glaube, daß fast alle unsere Traurigkeiten Momente der Spannung sind, die wir als Lähmung empfinden, weil wir unsere befremdeten Gefühle nicht mehr leben hören. Weil wir mit dem Fremden, das bei uns eingetreten ist, allein sind, weil uns alles Vertraute und Gewohnte für einen Augenblick fortgenommen ist; weil wir mitten in einem Übergang stehen, wo wir nicht stehen bleiben können.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“In later years it would sometimes happen that I’d wake up at night and see the stars so real in the sky and so meaningful in their course, and couldn’t understand how anyone could bring themselves to miss so much of the world.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Maybe we’re here only to say: house,
bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window —
at most, pillar, tower … but to say them, remember,
oh, to say them in a way that the things themselves
never dreamed of existing so intensely.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“For it is not inertia alone
that is responsible for human relationships repeating
themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and
unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new,unforeseeable
experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.

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.”
― Rilke

“Love is the capacity of two solitudes to protect and border and greet each other.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“And if what is close is far, then the space around you is wide indeed and already among the stars; take pleasure in your growth, in which no one can accompany you, and be kind-hearted towards those you leave behind, and be assured and gentle with them and do not plague them with your doubts or frighten them with your confidence or your joyfulness, which they cannot understand.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Und dann und wann ein Weiser Elephant”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Die schönsten Gedichte von Rainer Maria Rilke

“To što se moja peć opet zadimila pa sam morao da iziđem, to zaista nije nikakva nesreća. Što se osećam klonuo i prehlađen, nema nikakva značaja. Što sam celog dana hodao po uličicama, to je moja sopstvena krivica. Mogao sam i da isto tako sedim u Luvru. Ili ne, to nisam mogao. Onde ima izvesnih ljudi koji žele da se greju. Oni sede na somotskim klupama, a noge im kao velike prazne čizme počivaju jedne pored drugih na ogradama radijatora. To su izvanredno skromni ljudi, zahvalni kad ih trpe sluge u tamnim uniformama sa mnogim ordenjem. Ali kad stupim unutra, oni se smejulje. Smejulje se i malo klimaju glavom. A onda, dok idem tamo-amo ispred slika, zadržavaju me u očima, stalno u očima, stalno u tim promešanim, slivenim očima. Bilo je, dakle, dobro što nisam otišao u Luvr.”
― Rilke

“Rufe mich zu jener deiner Stunden,
die dir unaufhörlich widersteht.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Pa još se uopšte nisam privikao ovom svetu, koji mi se čini dobar. Šta ću u nekom drugom ? Tako bih rado ostao među značenjima koja sam zavoleo, pa ako se već nešto mora promeniti želeo bih da bar smem živeti među psima, koji imaju srodan svet i iste stvari.”
― Rilke

“I don't have much knowledge yet in grief -
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.
Der Panther”
― Rilke Rainer-Maria

“Just as the sheet nearest to hand takes from a master
The true hasty stroke, just so
The mirror often takes into itself
The sole, the divine laugh of a girl,

As she experiences the morning, alone -
Or in the radiance of attendant candlelight.
And later, when this visage actually breathes,
Gives back only a reflection.

What eyes have not upon occasion gazed
Into the long-smoking embers that fade in the fire:
Life-glimpses, lost forever?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus