Rainer Maria Rilke > Quotes

“Aparecerá la mujer cuyo nombre ya no significará sólo algo opuesto al hombre, sino algo propio, independiente. Nada que haga pensar en complemento ni en límite, sino tan sólo en vida y en ser: el Humano femenino...”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Para terminar querría aconsejaros ir creciendo de manera tranquila y sincera siguiendo vuestra propia evolución; la manera más probable de dificultar vuestra evolución es mirar al exterior y esperar del exterior repuestas a preguntas que tal vez solo pueda responder vuestro más íntimo sentimiento en su momento de mayor silencio.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Cartas a un joven poeta / Elegías de Duino

“These Things, whose essential life want to express, first ask you, “Are you free? Are you prepared to devote all your love to me, to lie with me as St. Julian the Hospitaller lay beside the leper, giving him the supreme embrace which no simple, fleeting love of one’s neighbor could accomplish, because its motive is love, the whole of love, all the love that exists on earth.” And if the Thing sees that you are otherwise occupied, with even a particle of your interest, it shuts itself off; it may perhaps give you some slight sign of friendship, a word, or a nod, but it will never give you its heart, entrust you with its patient being, its sweet sidereal constancy, which makes it so like the constellations in the sky. In order for a Thing to speak to you, you must regard it for a certain time as the only one that exists, as the one and only phenomenon, which through your laborious and exclusive love is now placed at the center of the universe, and which, in that incomparable place, is on that day attended by angels."

—from letter to Baladine Klossowska, (December 16, 1920)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“el destino por sí mismo es como una tela amplia y maravillosa, en la cual cada hebra es guiada por una mano infinitamente tierna; permanece junto a otra hebra, y es contenida y apoyada por cientos de otras.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Cartas a un Joven Poeta

“I, who even as a child had been so distrustful of music (not because it took me out of myself more powerfully than anything else, but because I had noticed that it did not put me back where it had found me, but left me deeper down, somewhere in the heart of things unfinished),”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“[...] si disponemos nuestra vida según el principio que nos aconseja mantenernos siempre en lo difícil, lo que nos parecía extraño, se nos transformará en algo infinitamente fiel y digno de toda confianza. [...] Quizá todos los dragones de nuestra vida sean princesas que sólo esperan vernos una vez hermosos y valientes. Quizá todo lo horrible, en el fondo, sea sólo una forma de desamparo que solicita nuestra ayuda.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“İstirahat. Bir kere de misafirliği tadıyor.....Bir kere de her şeyi kendi haline bırakmak ve şunu bilmek: Ne olursa iyi olur...”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Se nos fosse possível ver mais adiante do que nosso saber alcança, e um pouco além do baluarte de nosso pressentimento, talvez suportássemos, com maior confiança, mais as nossas tristezas que as nossas alegrias.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Painter

“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. Do not now 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. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of forming and creating, as a particularly happy and pure way of living. School yourself for it, but take what comes in complete trust, and as long as it is a product of your will, of some kind of inner necessity, accept it and do not despise it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Earth, isn't this what you want: to arise
in us invisible?—Isn't your dream
one day to be invisible?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“Perhaps every terror is, in its deepest essence, something that needs our recognition or help.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Entre el día y el sueño estoy en casa
donde duermen los niños, tibios de correrías
y los viejos se sientan por la tarde,
y arden hogares y su espacio alumbran.
Entre el día y el sueño estoy en casa
donde suenan campanas de oración
y muchachas, cohibidas por ecos que se extinguen,
se apoyan fatigadas en el brocal del pozo.
Y hay un tilo, que es mi árbol predilecto:
y todos los veranos que en él callan
se vuelven a mover en las mil ramas
y entre el día y el sueño vuelven a despertar.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Este distinguido Hotel es muy antiguo. Ya en la época del rey Clodoveo se podía morir en algunos lechos. Ahora se muere en quinientas cincuenta y nueve camas. En serie, naturalmente. Es evidente que, a causa de una producción tan intensa, cada muerte individual no queda tan bien acabada, pero esto importa poco. El número es lo que cuenta. ¿Quién concede todavía importancia a una muerte bien acabada? Nadie. Hasta los ricos, que podrían sin embargo permitirse ese lujo, comienzan a hacerse descuidados e indiferentes; el deseo de tener una muerte propia es cada vez más raro. Dentro de poco será tan raro como una vida personal. Dios mío, es que está todo hecho. Se llega, se encuentra una existencia ya preparada; no hay más que revestirse con ella. Si se quiere partir, o si se está obligado a marcharse: sobre todo ¡nada de esfuerzos! "Voilà votre mort, monsieur." Se muere según viene la cosa, se muere de la muerte que forma parte de la enfermedad que se sufre. (Pues desde que se conocen todas las enfermedades se sabe perfectamente que las diferentes salidas mortales dependen de las enfermedades, y no de los hombres: y el enfermo, por decirlo así, no tiene nada que hacer.)
En los sanatorios, donde se muere tan a gusto y con tanto agradecimiento hacia los médicos y las enfermeras, se muere habitualmente de una de las muertes asignadas al establecimiento; está muy bien visto. Cuando se muere en casa, es natural que se escoja esa muerte cortés de la buena sociedad, con la que en cierto modo se inaugura ya un entierro de primera clase y toda la serie de sus admirables tradiciones. Entonces, los pobres se paran delante de estas casas y se sacian con estos espectáculos. Su muerte propia es, naturalmente, trivial, sin todos los requisitos. Se sienten dichosos encontrando una que más o menos les viene bien. Puede ser quizá demasiado ancha: siempre se crece todavía un poco. Solamente resulta molesto cuando no cierra sobre el pecho o ahoga.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Lovers were not, Marina, are not permitted to know
destruction so deeply. Must be as if they were new.
Only their grave is old, only it ponders and darkens
under the sobbing tree, remembering all that has been.
Only their grave collapses; they are supple as reeds;
what bends them too far, rounds them into rich garlands.
How they blow about in the May wind! From the midst of
the Ever,
in which you breathe and surmise, the moment has shut
them out.
(Oh how I understand you, female flower on the same
imperishable stalk. How wildly I scatter myself into the
night air
that in a moment will touch you.)…”

―from Elegy: to Marina Tsvetayeva-Efron”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“.تۆ وەک ڕەوە ئاسکێکی پڕشنگدار ڕادەکەیت و منیش تاریکم، من دارستانم”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Was berechtigt Sie dann, ihn, welcher niemals war, wie einen Vergangenen zu vermissen und zu suchen, als ob er verloren wäre?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“And you must not let yourself be diverted out of your solitude by the fact that something in you wants to escape from it. Precisely this desire, if you use it calmly and judiciously, as a kind of a tool, will help you to extend your solitude over a greater expanse of ground.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Works of art are of an infinite solitariness, and nothing is less likely to bring us near to them than criticism. Only love can apprehend and hold them, and can be just towards them.— Decide each time according to yourself and your feelings in the face of every such declaration, discussion or introduction; if you should still be wrong, the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly in the course of time to other perceptions. Let your judgments have their own quiet, undisturbed development, which must, like all progress, come from deep within, and cannot in any way be pressed or hurried. It means everything to carry for the full time and then to bring forth. To allow every impression and every germ of a feeling to grow to completion wholly in yourself, in the darkness, in the unutterable, unconscious, inaccessible to your own understanding, and to await with deep humility and patience the hour of birth of a new clarity: that is alone what living as an artist means: in understanding as in creation.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Go to the limits of your longing.
...
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours

“All I wanted to do in the end was advise you to go through your development quietly and seriously ; you cannot disrupt it more than looking outwards.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Misschien staat alles wel in het teken van een groot moederschap, als een gemeenschappelijk verlangen. De schoonheid van de maagd, een wezen dat (zoals u het zo fraai uitdrukt) ‘nog niet heeft opgeleverd’, bestaat in het moederschap, dat zichzelf voorvoelt en voorbereidt, dat vrees en verlangens koester. En de schoonheid van de moeder bestaat in een dienend moederschap, en in de oude vrouw leeft een grote herinnering voort. En ook in de man is moederschap, lijkt me, zowel lichamelijk als geestelijk; zijn verwekken is ook een soort baren, en baren is het als hij uit zijn meest persoonlijke rijkdom creeert. En misschien zijn de seksen wel verwanter dan men denkt, en de grote vernieuwing van de wereld zal er misschien wel in bestaan dat de man en het meisje, bevrijd van alle valse gevoelens en gevoelens van onlust, elkaar niet als hun tegenpool zullen zoeken, maar als broer en zus en als buren, en dat zij zich als mens zullen aaneensluiten om eenvoudig, ernstig en geduldig de hun opgelegde zware last van hun seksualiteit gezamenlijk te dragen.
- Thans in Worpswede bij Bremen, 16 juli 1903”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Allow your verdicts their own quiet untroubled development which like all progress must come from deep within and cannot be forced or accelerated”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“And you must not let yourself be diverted out of your solitude by the fact that something in you wants to escape from it. Precisely this desire, if you use it calmly and judiciously, as a kind of tool, will help you to extend your solitude over a greater expanse of ground.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“But alas, with poems one accomplishes so little when one writes them early. One should hold off and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, right at the end, one could perhaps write ten lines that are good. For poems are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough—they are experiences.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Bana iyi görünen bu dünyaya hiç de alışmış değilim. Başka bir dünyada ne işim var? Hoşlandığım anlamlar arasında kalmayı çok isterdim ve eğer bir şeyler değişecekse, ben en azından, bize akraba bir dünyaları olan ve aynı şeylere sahip köpekler arasında yaşamama izin verilsin isterim.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“There is only a single, urgent task: to attach oneself someplace to nature, to that which is strong, striving and bright with unreserved readiness, and then to move forward in one’s efforts without any calculation or guile, even when engaged in the most trivial and mundane activities. (Letters on Life)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Ve bir ağaç gibiyim kimi zaman,
bir mezarın üzerinde yaprak hışırtılarıyla
(bedenini sıcak kökleriyle kucakladığı)
genç çocuğun hüzünlerin ve şarkıların arasında
yitirdiği düşü gerçekleştiren,olgun bir ağaç.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Aber auch dann ist diese Einkehr, um die ich Sie bitte, nicht vergebens gewesen. Ihr Leben wird auf jeden Fall von da ab eigene Wege finden, und daß es gute, reiche und weite sein mögen, das wünsche ich Ihnen mehr, als ich sagen kann.
[...] und schließlich wollte ich Ihnen ja auch nur raten, still und ernst durch Ihre Entwicklung durchzuwachsen; Sie können sie gar nicht heftiger stören, als wenn Sie nach außen sehen und von außen Antwort erwarten auf Fragen, die nur Ihr innerstes Gefühl in Ihrer leisesten Stunde vielleicht beantworten kann.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“But the living are wrong in the sharp distinctions they make.
Angels, it seems, don't always know if they're moving among the living or the dead.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke