Rainer Maria Rilke > Quotes

“Does time really exist, time the destroyer?
When will it break down the castle into mere fragments?
When will this heart which has always been in the service of the gods
Be governed by the Creator, the Demiurge?

Are we really so desperately fragile
As Fate would wish to make us?
Is childhood, which is so deep, so full of promise,
Later stilled at its root?

Oh, the spectre of perishability,
How it infiltrates and passes through the innocently receptive,
As if it were smoke!

And we, we who are drifting,
We still rank as a divine rite
Amongst those lasting Powers.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“Do not look for answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. 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

“Yetişmekteydik elbet ve kimi zaman aceleciydik
büyümekte, büyümüş olmanın dışında bir şeyleri
bulunmayanları memnun etmek için.
Oysa yalnız başımıza kaldığımızda hep
kalıcılıktı peşinden koştuğumuz, yerimiz
dünya ile oyun arasında bir ara-alandı;
ta başlangıcından bu yana ancak
tertemiz adımlara hazır bir yer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems [by] Rainer Maria Rilke; tr. by Jessie Lemont, with an introduction by H. T. 1918 [Leather Bound]

“Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism; they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Always trust yourself. If it turns out you are wrong, then that natural course of your inner life will lead you to other insights.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Do not watch yourself too closely. Do not draw over-rapid conclusions from what is happening to you. Simply let it happen.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Si ahora se acercara el arcángel, el peligroso, detrás de las estrellas, si bajara dando un paso sólo y viniendo de allí: hacia arriba latiendo, nuestro propio corazón nos mataría. ¿Quién sois?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“Every blessed space is both child and grandchild of dissolution,
for that which is stored up drains away. And Daphne, in her metamorphosis,
as she feels herself becoming a laurel, wishes that you evanesce into the wind.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“If we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it becomes clear that most people get to know only one corner of their room, a window seat, a strip of floor which they pace up and down. In that way they have a certain security.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To a Young Poet

“This heaviness—toiling on as if bound through a landscape of things forever unfinished, is like the awkward walking of the swan.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems: A Revised Bilingual Edition

“Sé que su profesión es dura y está llena de contradicciones que le afectan.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need? Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke

“This again is one of the hardest tests of the creative individual: he must always remain unconscious, unsuspecting of his best virtues, if he would not rob them of their ingenuousness and untouchedness!”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I live my life in widening circles
that drift out over the things.
I may not achieve the very last,
but it will be my aim.

I circle around God, around the age-old tower;
I’ve been circling for millennia
and still I don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm,
or a sovereign song?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“You see, I want a lot.
Maybe I want it all:
the darkness of each endless fall,
the shimmering light of each ascent.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Du Siehst, ich will viel,” Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (Riverhead Books, 1996)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“It began as a meal. And became a feast, a festival – they hardly know how. The high flames flare, the voices whirr, wild songs stir from glitter and glance, and at last from the ripened rhythms in the air: arises the dance. And it sweeps them all up. You feel the wavebeats pounding through the room, you touch somebody, breathe-in her perfume, you part from her and find her once again, and then, through all the light-filled melodies, dazzled, you sway upon the summer breeze which fills the dresses that warm women wear.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke

“If we imagine our being as a room of any size, it seems that most of us know only a single corner of that room, a spot by the window, a narrow strip on which we keep walking back and forth. That gives a kind of security. But isn't insecurity with all its dangers so much more human?

We are not prisoners of that room.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Wie viel ist aufzuleiden !

(Koliko patnje treba odraditi)”
― Maria Rilke Rainer

“Think [...] of the world that you carry within you, and call this thinking whatever you like. Whether it is memory of your own childhood or longing for you own future – just be attnetive towards what rises up inside you, and place it above everything that you notice round about.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Un giorno esisterà la fanciulla e la donna, il cui nome non significherà più soltanto un contrapposto al maschile, ma qualcosa per sé, qualcosa per cui non si penserà a complemento e confine, ma solo a vita reale: l’umanità femminile.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Lettere a un giovane poeta/Lettere a una giovane signora/Su Dio

“Θα σας κυριεύσει ένας κόσμος, η ευτυχία, η πλησμονή, το ακατανόητο μέγεθος του σύμπαντος. Ζήστε για λίγο μέσα στα βιβλία αυτά, μάθετε από εκείνα ό,τι σας φαίνεται άξιο μάθησης, αλλά, πάνω απ' όλα, αγαπήστε τα”
― Rilke

“Durch alle Wesen reicht der eine Raum:
Weltinnenraum. Die Vögel fliegen still
durch uns hindurch. O, der ich wachsen will,
ich seh hinaus, und in mir wächst der Baum.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“How far does my life reach,
and where does the night begin?”
― Rilke

“The carriages drove right through me, and hurrying people did not swerve aside for me and ran over me full of contempt, as over a bad place in which stale water has collected....O what a world it is! Pieces, pieces of people, parts of animals, remains of finished things, and everything still on the move, driving about as if in an uncanny wind, carried and carrying, falling and catching themselves up in their fall.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Wie soll ich meine Seele halten, daß
sie nicht an deine rührt? Wie soll ich sie
hinheben über dich zu andern Dingen?
Ach gerne möchte ich sie bei irgendetwas
Verlorenem im Dunkel unterbringen
an einer fremden stillen Stelle, die
nicht weiterschwingt, wenn diene Tiefen schwingen.
Doch alles, was uns anrührt, dich und mich,
nimmt uns zusammen wie ein Bogenstrich,
die aus zwei Saiten eine Stimme zieht.
Auf welches Instrument sind wir gespannt?
Und welcher Geiger hat uns in der Hand?
O süßes Lied.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Often I gazed at you in wonder. I stood at the window begun yesterday,
stood and marvelled at you. Yet the new city
was denied me and the unpersuaded landscape
darkened, as though I were nothing. Nor did things close by
venture to be understood. The street thrust upwards
at the lamp post: I could see it was an alien thing.
Over there a room, sympathetic, clear in the lamplight –
I was already a part; this they sensed, closed the shutters.
Remained there. Then a child cried. I knew the mothers
in the houses around, of what they are capable – and I knew
at once the inconsolable argument behind all weeping.
Or a voice sang out and reached a little beyond
expectation, or down below an old man
who coughed full of reproach, as if his body
were in the right and the gentler world in error. Then the hour struck,
but I counted too late, it fell past me.
Like a boy, a stranger, at last deemed worthy to join in
yet drops the ball and knows none of the games
in which the others indulge with such ease,
stands there, looks away – to where?: I stood and suddenly
became aware, you approached me, played with me, I understood,
grown-up night, and I gazed at you enraptured. Where the towers
raged and, with fate averted, a city loomed over me
and before me were ranged unknowable mountains
and in the narrowing circle of hungering strangeness
welled the random flickering of my feelings
there it was, higher one,
no shame for you, that you know me. Your breath
passed over me, across widening solemn expanses
your smile entered into me.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems to Night

“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.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

“If moved by the god’s example, never
Can his voice fail him, even for lowly things.
Everything becomes vineyard, all becomes clusters of grapes,
And his sensibilities are south-facing.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive and lend it grandeur and height. And those who come together in the nighttime and are entwined in a cradle of desire are carrying out a serious work in collecting sweetness, profundity, and strength for the song of some poet yet to come, who will rise up to speak unutterable pleasures.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet