Rainer Maria Rilke > Quotes

“You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. And you say that even this passing was difficult and upsetting for you. But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven’t rather gone right through you. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I can see myself lying in my little high-sided bed, not sleeping and somehow vaguely intimating that that was how life would be: full of special things that are only intended for one person and cannot be told of.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Nothing can touch a work of art less than critical words; all that comes of that are more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things are not as easy to understand and say as we might prefer to believe; most events are inexpressible, happening in a space where no word has ever set foot, and most inexpressible of all are works of art, mysterious existences, whose life continues as ours passes away.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“In marriage, the point is not to achieve a rapid union by tearing down and toppling all boundaries. Rather, in a good marriage each person appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude and thus shows him the greatest faith he can bestow. The being-together of two human beings is an impossibility; where it nonetheless seems to be present it is a limitation, a mutual agreement that robs one or both parts of their fullest freedom and development. Yet once it is recognized that even among the closest people there remain infinite distances, a wonderful coexistence can develop once they succeed in loving the vastness between them that affords them the possibility of seeing each other in their full gestalt before a vast sky!”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“You are a young, all still lies ahead of you, 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 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 now.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“To transcend the ego does not mean, for Rilke, to enter into a spiral of radical self-doubt and philosophical skepticism or to open the floodgates of unconscious desire and irrationality. It means to be swept up by the movement of one’s heart (or soul, if you like, or serotonin levels) without ever reaching a state where this movement will lose its purpose and desire by being fulfilled.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life: New Prose Translations

“Your task is to love what you don't understand.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Pericolose e maligne sono quelle tristezze soltanto, che si portano tra le gente, per soverchiarle col rumore; come malattie, che vengano trattate superficialmente e in maniera sconsiderata, fanno solo un passo indietro e dopo una breve pausa erompono tanto più paurosamente; e si raccolgono nell'intimo e sono vita, sono vita non vissuta, avvilita, perduta, di cui si può morire.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“To love is also good, for love is hard. Love between one person and another: that is perhaps the hardest thing it is laid on us to do, the utmost, the ultimate trial and test, the work for which all other work is just preparation.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“No hay nada que sea menos apropiado para abordar una obra de arte que las palabras críticas.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Cartas a un joven poeta / Letters to a Young Poet (Clásicos ilustrados)

“There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself...Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Çocukluğum için niyazda bulundum, ve işte çocukluğum geri geldi, ve hissediyorum ki çocukluk, evvelden nasılsa yine öyle ağır ve hiç de fayda etmemiş yaşlanmak.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“rejoice in your growth, in which you naturally can take no one with you, and be kind to those who remain behind, and be sure and calm before them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with your confidence or joy, which they could not understand. Seek yourself some sort of simple and loyal community with them, which need not necessarily change as you yourself become different and again different; love in them life in an unfamiliar form”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

“There is no measuring with time, not even a year matters, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: to neither reckon nor count; to ripen like the tree, which does not rush its sap, and stands firm in the storms of spring, without anxiety that summer may not come after. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there, as if eternity lay before them, so carelessly silent and vast. I learn it daily, learn it with pain, am grateful for it: Patience is all!”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“No one can advise and assist you, no one. There is only one way: go into yourself.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“confesse a si mesmo se o senhor morreria caso fosse proibido de escrever. Sobretudo isto: pergunte a si mesmo na hora mais silenciosa de sua madrugada: preciso escrever?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Oh scattered band, once my playmates, you few
Who were amidst the gardens here and there in the city,
How hesitantly we located one another, took fancies and
Like the tapestry lamb whose mute words are on a scroll,

Spoke through silence. Our little joys were
Never communicated, - Whose indeed were they?
And among all the passers-by, those hurriers, how it all
Evanesced quite away, weighed down by the torment of the endless year.

Past us were drawn the carriages, wholly indifferent,
Round us the houses stood strong but not real, - and none
Of these were aware of us. What was truly real in it all?

Nothing. Only the balls we tossed, their magnificent arcs,
But certainly not the children. ... Though sometimes one would step
- Alas, one who would soon be lost, - beneath a falling ball.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“I am learning to see. Why, I cannot say, but all things enter more deeply into me; nor do the impressions remain at the level where they used to cease. There is a place within me of which I knew nothing. Now all things tend that way. I do not know what happens there.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“And now I would remember you once more, show you forth,
Oh you whom I knew like a flower
Of which I didn’t know the name, oh spirited-away,
Exquisite playmate of an unascendable scream.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“«La idea de ser creador, de engendrar, de dar forma y vida» nada es sin su amplia, perpetua confirmación y realización en el universo. Nada sin el ascenso que, de mil modos repetido, emana de los animales y de las cosas. Y si su disfrute resulta indeciblemente bello y rico, es sólo porque está pleno de recuerdos heredados de los engendramientos y partos de millones de seres que nos precedieron… En un pensamiento creador reviven miles y miles de noches de amor olvidadas, que lo llenan de nobleza y celsitud. Y los que en las noches se juntan, entrelazados y voluptuosamente mecidos en su amor, llevan a cabo una empresa muy seria, y atesoran dulzuras, hondura y fuerza para el himno de algún poeta venidero, que un día se alzará para cantar inefables delicias. Así llaman al porvenir. Y aun cuando yerren, aun cuando sean ciegos sus abrazos, el porvenir llega.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“And perhaps the sexes are more related than we think, and the great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbours, and will come together as human beings, in order simply, seriously and patiently to bear in common the difficult sex that has been laid upon them.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“To love is also good: because love is difficult. For one person to love another: that is perhaps the hardest thing that is handed to us, the utmost, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their powers, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But the period of learning is always a long, secluded time, and so, for a long time to come and far on into life, love is:—solitude, heightened and deepened loneliness for the person who loves.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Practised in the present, patience is the art of courting the future.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Song"

You, whom I do not tell that all night long
I lie weeping,
whose very being makes me feel wanting
like a cradle.

You, who do not tell me, that you lie awake
thinking of me:--
what, if we carried all these longings within us
without ever being overwhelmed by them,
letting them pass?

Look at these lovers, tormented by love,
when first they begin confessing,
how soon they lie!

You make me feel alone. I try imagining:
one moment it is you, then it's the soaring wind;
a fragrance comes and goes but never lasts.
Oh, within my arms I lost all whom I loved!
Only you remain, always reborn again.
For since I never held you, I hold you fast.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“We have no reason to be mistrustful of our world, for it is not against us. If it holds terrors they are our terrors, if it has its abysses these abysses belong to us, if there are dangers then we must try to love them. And if we only recognise our life according to the principle which teaches us always to hold to what is difficult, then what now still appears most foreign will become our most intimate and most reliable experience.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love... Life always says Yes and No simultaneously. Death (I implore you to believe) is the true Yea-sayer. It stands before eternity and says only: Yes.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“For imagining an individual's existence as a larger or smaller room reveals to us that most people are only acquainted with one corner of their particular room, a place by the window, a little area to pace up and down. That way, they have a certain security. And yet the perilous uncertainty that drives the prisoners in Poe's tales to grope out the outlines of their terrible dungeons and so to know the unspeakable horrors of their surroundings, is so much more human.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“if a sadness arises before you, greater than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and the shadows of clouds, passes over your hands and over all you do, you must suppose that something is acting upon you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand. It will not let you fall.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Sanat, kişilerin, yalnızların içlerini doldurmak için bir araçtır; bunun böyle olduğunu biliyor musunuz siz? Napoleon, dışa doğru ne ise, sanatçı da içe doğru odur… Sanat özgürlüğe götüren bir yoldur; bunun böyle olduğunu biliyor musunuz siz? Uzaktaki dünyaların olgunlaşarak nasıl tanrı olacaklarını bilmiyorum. Ama bizim için sanat, bu tanrılığa götüren bir yoldur… Tanrı soyundan olduğumuzu sanıyorum ben.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke