Rainer Maria Rilke > Quotes

“I don’t want to think a place for you.
Speak to me from everywhere.
Your Gospel can be comprehended
without looking for its source.

When I go toward you
it is with my whole life.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Das Stunden-Buch: Enthaltend die drei Bücher: Vom mönchischen Leben/Von der Pilgerschaft/Von der Armut und vom Tode

“And if I have anything else to say to you it is this: do not think that the person who is trying to console you lives effortlessly among the simple, quiet words that sometimes make you feel better. His life is full of troubles and sadness and falls far short of them. But if it were any different he could never have found the words that he did. Yours, Rainer Maria Rilke”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“و با این همه هنوز داشتن خاطره بس نیست. باید بتوانی‌ هنگامی که انباشته شدند از یادشان ببری و صبر بسیار پیشه کنی‌ و منتظر شوی تا دیگر بار بازگردند، زیرا خاطرات خود به کار نمی‌‌آیند. آنگاه که در جانمان به خون و نگاه و رفتار تبدیل میشوند، آنگاه که دیگر نامی‌ ندارند و از ما جدا نیستند، شاید در ساعتی‌ یگانه، از این میان نخستین واژهٔ شعری برخیزد و رها شود.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Wir hielten uns noch fester zwischen Sternen.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“And if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses—would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention thither. Try to raise the submerged sensations of that ample past; your personality will grow more firm, your solitude will widen and will become a dusky dwelling past which the noise of others goes by far away.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“And even if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses—would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention thither. Try to raise the submerged sensations of that ample past; your personality will grow more firm, your solitude will widen and will become a dusky dwelling past which the noise of others goes by far away.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Don’t commend yourselves, dispensers of justice, that the rack
Is superseded, and collars of iron no longer fetter our necks.
Not one person, not one heart, has been elated that in our day
An intentional spasm of clemency contorts you into appearing more delicate.

The scaffold repays what it has received
Over time, like children their toys from old birthdays.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“And you, Clara Westhoff, how simply and well you endured, lived through the experience, and made it a forward step in your young existence! So great was your love that it was able to forgive the great dying, and your eye was so sure, even then, that it conceived beauty in all the new colors, feelings, and gestures of the earth, and that all coming to an end seemed for your feeling only a pretext under which Nature wanted to unfold beauties yet unrevealed. Just as the eyes of angels rest on a dying child, delighting in the similar transfiguration of its half-released little face, so without concern you saw in the dying earth the smile and the beauty and the trust in eternity."

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

“And where a great and unique person speaks, the rest of us should be silent”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“The mind is but a visitor: it thinks us out of our world. Each mind fabricates itself. We sense its limits, for we have made them.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours

“True singing is breath of another kind.
A breath that aims nowhere. Pneuma within the god. A zephyr.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“lo que llamamos destino no entra en nosotros desde el exterior, sino que emerge de nosotros.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Cartas a un Joven Poeta

“Do not search for the answers, which cannot be given you, because you could not live them. That is the point, to live everything, Now you must live your problems. And perhaps gradually, without noticing it, you will live your way into the answer some distant day.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“But I ask you to consider whether these great unhappiness did not rather pass through you. Whether much within you has not changed, whether somewhere, in some part of your being, you were not transformed while you were unhappy?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Y a la vez quede expresado aquí el ruego: lea lo menos que pueda cosas estético-críticas: o son opiniones partidistas, petrificadas y vaciadas de sentido en su endurecimiento contra la vida, o son hábiles juegos de palabras, en que hoy se saca una opinión y mañana la opuesta. Las obras de arte son de una infinita soledad, y con nada se pueden alcanzar menos que con la crítica. Sólo el amor puede captarlas y retenerlas, y sólo él puede tener razón frente a ellas.”
― rainer maria rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Ma vie n’est pas cette heure abrupte
où tu me vois précipité
Je suis un arbre devant mon décor,
Je ne suis qu’une de mes bouches,
celle de toutes qui se clora la première.

Je suis l’intervalle entre les deux notes
qui ne s’accordent l’une et l’autre qu’à grand’peine,
car celle de la mort voudrait monter plus haut…
Mais toutes deux, vibrant durant l’obscure pause,
se sont réconciliées.
Et le chant reste beau.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“There I sat with your books, you headstrong man,20 trying to form an opinion of them, as others do who have not read you all of a piece but have taken a part for themselves and been satisfied. For I did not yet appreciate the nature of fame, that public demolition of one who is in the making, on to whose building site the mob irrupt, knocking his stones all over the place.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“And so I repress myself, and swallow the call-note of depth-dark sobbing.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“…ще се събират като хора, за да носят заедно – просто, сериозно и търпеливо – тежестта на пола, която им е възложена.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Писма до един млад поет / Писма до една млада жена / Райнер Мария Рилке – Марина Цветаева: кореспонденция

“No one can advise and assist you, no one. There is only one way: go into yourself. Seek out the reason that commands you to write; discover if it has stretched out its roots into the deepest part of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would have to die if it were forbidden you to write.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“For now I knew that out there, too, there was nothing but my loneliness, the loneliness I had brought upon myself and which was of an enormity that my heart was no longer equal to. I recalled people I had once left, and it was simply beyond me that one could part from other human beings.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Do not observe yourself too much. Do not draw too hasty conclusions from what happens to you; let it simply happen to you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“There is no more wretched prison than the fear of hurting a person who loves you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke on Love

“This, yes this, is the animal who never was.
No one ever saw one, but they loved it all the same.
- Its gait, the way it carried itself, its little throat,
The radiance of its quiet gaze, - all were loved.

Truly, it never existed. But yet because they loved it,
A very creature came to be. They always kept a space for it.
And in that space, left clear and free, it readily
Raised its head and thus scarcely required actually

To exist. They nourished it, not with feed,
But merely with the conception that it might come to be.
And they bestowed such intensity upon the beast

That it impelled a horn to grow forth from its brow.
A single horn. It approached an unsullied maiden, all white.
And it is in her silver mirror; it is in her.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“My body glows in every vein and blooms
To fullest flower since I first knew thee,
My walk unconscious pride and power assumes;
Who art thou then- thou who awaitest me?

When from the past I draw myself the while
I lose old traits as leaves of autumn fall;
I only know the radiance of thy smile,
Like the soft gleam of stars, transforming all.

- Offering”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“For it is not inertia alone that makes human relationships so unspeakably monotonous and devoid of renewal in one case after another, it is the fear of any new, unforeseeable experience for which one does not feel prepared.”
― RANIER MARIA RILKE, Rainer Maria Rilke: Bütün siirlerinden seçmeler

“So badly does one live, because one always comes incomplete into the present, inept and scatter-brained.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“A happy poet who writes about his window and the glass doors of his bookcases that reflect pensively a beloved, lonely vastness. This is the poet I would have liked to become (...)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge