Rainer Maria Rilke > Quotes

“Progress

And again my inmost life rushes louder,
as if it moved now between steeper banks.
Objects become ever more related to me,
and all pictures ever more perused.
I feel myself more trusting in the nameless:
with my senses, as with birds, I reach
into the windy heavens from the oak,
and into the small ponds' broken-off day
my feeling sinks, as if it stood on fishes.

(Fortschritt

Und wieder rauscht mein tiefes Leben lauter,
als ob es jetzt in breitern Ufern ginge.
Immer verwandter werden mir die Dinge
und alle Bilder immer angeschauter.
Dem Namenlosen fühl ich mich vertrauter:
Mit meinen Sinnen, wie mit Vögeln, reiche
ich in die windigen Himmel aus der Eiche,
und in den abgebrochnen Tag der Teiche
sinkt, wie auf Fischen stehend, mein Gefühl.)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“How dear will you be to me then,
you nights of affliction. Why couldn't I kneel more deeply and accept you,
inconsolable sisters, or lose myself more
freely in your loosened hair. We spendthrifts of sorrows.
How we scan beyond them ahead into sad duration
to see if perhaps they might have an end. But they are truly
our winter-hardy foliage, the dark green of our life's meaning,
one season of our secret year—, not only
time—, but also place, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“But difficult things are what we were set to do, almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“He renders himself so flat that many people pass by every day without ever seeing him. He does still have something of a voice left, true, and uses it to draw attention; but it is no different from a noise in a lamp or a stove, or the odd irregular dripping of water in a cave. And the world is so ordered that there are people who are forever passing by, their whole lives long, in that interval when he moves on, making less of a sound than anything else that moves, like the hand of a clock, like the shadow of the hand of a clock, like time itself.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“One day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer just signify the opposite of the male but something in their own right, something which does not make one think of any suplement or limit but only of life and existence: the female human being.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“No se observe demasiado a sí mismo. No saque conclusiones demasiado rápidas de lo que le ocurra.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“When something's let go of, it circles; and though we are rarely the center of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose

“Do not strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“You are looking to the outside, and that above all you should not be doing now.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Do you remember…(doesn’t that appear in each of my letters?), do you remember that you spoke of how eagerly you experienced that period when for the first time autumn and winter were to meet you not in the city, but among the trees whose happiness you knew, whose spring and summer rang in your earliest memories and were mingled with everything warm and dear and tender and with the infinitely blissful melancholies of summer evenings and of long, yearning nights of spring. You knew just as much of them as of the dear people in your surroundings, among whom also summer and spring, kindness and happiness were dedicated to you and whose influence held sway above your growing up and maturing, and whose other experiences would touch you only by report and rarely like a shot in the wood of which superstitious folk tell for a long time. But now you were to remain out in the country house that was growing lonely and were to see the beloved trees suffer in the rising wind, and were to see how the dense park is torn apart before the windows and becomes spacious and everywhere, even in very deep places, discloses the sky which, with infinite weariness, lets itself rain and strikes with heavy drops on the aging leaves that are dying in touching humility. And you were to see suffering where until now was only rapture and anticipation, and were to learn to endure dying in the very place where the heart of life had beaten most loudly upon yours. And you were to behave like the grownups who all at once may know everything, yes, who become grown up just because of the fact that even the darkest and saddest things do not have to be hidden from them, that one does not cover up the dead when they enter, nor hide those whose faces are sawed and torn by a sharp pain.”

―from letter to Clara Westhoff Schmargendorf (Sunday, November 18, 1900)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“... adına kader dediğimiz şeyin dışarıdan insanların içine girmediği, insanların içinden dışarı çıktığı da yavaş yavaş farkedilecektir.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Y hasta el destino mismo es como un
tejido amplio y maravilloso, en cuya trama cada hilo es guiado con infinita
ternura por una mano cariñosa, y colocado a la vera de otro hilo, para ser
sostenido y conllevado por otro mil”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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

“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. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. And if out of , this turning within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. So, dear Sir, I can't give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to, the question of whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will discover that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.”
― Rilke

“I was a free man before her gaze touched me - proud in my bitterness, arrogant in my loneliness. I wore my isolation like a crown.
I tough myself invincible.
And yet it took only one look - one careless, unkowning glance from her - to undo my entirely.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“She was brought up in the reformed Protestant Church but left it at the age of seventeen in protest against its restrictive rules.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters

“Understand, I'll slip quietly
away from the noisy crowd
when I see the pale stars rising,
blooming, over the oaks.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“The things we experience often cannot be expressed, and anyone who insists on telling them nevertheless, is bound to make mistakes…”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Stories of God

“Do you remember how that life yearned out of its childhood for the "great"? I see that it is now going on beyond the great to long for greater. For this reason it will not cease to be difficult, but for this reason too it will not cease to grow.

And if there is one thing more that I must say to you, it is this.

Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficult and sadness and remains far behinds yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“But on the other hand, I am very concerned when I imagine how strangled and cut off you currently live, afraid of touching anything that is filled with memories and what is not filled with memories?). You will freeze in place if you remain this way. You must not, dear. You have to move. You have to return to his things. You have to touch with your
hands his things, which through their manifold relations and affinity are after all also yours.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“¿Por qué quiere usted excluir de su vida toda inquietud, todo dolor, toda tristeza, si no sabe lo que esas situaciones producen en usted?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Cartas a un joven poeta / Letters to a Young Poet (Clásicos ilustrados)

“We have to be committed not to miss or neglect any opportunity to suffer, to have an experience, or to be happy; our soul arises refreshed from all of that. It has a resting place at those heights that are difficult to reach, and it is at home where one can advance no further: up there we have to carry it. But as soon as we put it down for dead at those extreme spots it awakens and takes flight into skies and celestial depths that from now on belong to us.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“Nos hemos vuelto además tan similares a esta vida por una adaptación de milenos que, cuando nos estamos quietos, apenas se nos puede distinguir, por un feliz mimetismo, de todo lo que nos rodea.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“das flüchtet... und sein Bangen ist groß,
daß ihr es selber / wie schlank es entschwindet/
nach vielem Traurigsein erst wiederfindet,
noch immer schreckhaft, warm und atemlos.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Is it essential that I write?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Live in these books for a while, learn from them what seems to be worth learning, but above all love them.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I believe that almost all our sadnesses are periods of tautening that we experience as numbness because we can no longer hear the stirring of our feelings, which have become foreign to us. Because we are alone with the strange thing that has entered into us; because everything familiar and accustomed is taken away from us for a moment; because we are in the middle of a transition where we cannot stand still. And that is why sadness passes: what is new in us, the thing that has supervened, has entered into our heart, penetrated to its innermost chamber and not lingered even there – it is already in our blood. And we never quite know what it was.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Hoe zouden wij die oude mythen kunnen vergeten die aan de wieg van alle volkeren staan – de mythen over draken die op het allerlaatste ogenblik in een prinses veranderen; misschien zijn alle draken uit ons leven wel prinsessen die er alleen maar op wachten ons eens mooi en moedig te zien. Misschien is al het verschrikkelijkste in diepste wezen wel het hulpeloze dat ons om hulp vraagt.
Borgeby Gård Flädie, Zweden, 12 augustus 2017”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet