Rainer Maria Rilke > Quotes

“Try to express what you see and experience and love and lose as if you were the first man alive.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Sein Sinn ist Zwiespalt. An der Kreuzung zweier
Herzwege steht kein Tempel für Apoll.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Y de lo que se trata es de vivirlo todo.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Ich will wie ein Kind im Krankenzimmer
Einsam, mit heimlichem Lächeln, leise,
Leise – Tage und Träume bauen.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all other green, with tiny waves on the edges of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)—: why then have to be human—and, escaping from fate, keep longing for fate? . . .”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“To them, in their confusion, the arc of fate resembles nothing they have ever known before. Just as, for so long, we were mistaken about the movement of the sun, we are still mistaken about what lies ahead of us in time. The future stands firm, dear Mr. Kappus; we, however, drift in infinite space.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Ein Kunstwerk ist gut, wenn es aus Notwendigkeit entstand.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Quizá los sexos estén más emparentados de lo que se cree y la gran renovación del mundo consistirá, quizá, en que el hombre y la mujer, liberados de todos los sentimientos erróneos y de todas las desganas, no se buscarán como opuestos, sino como hermanos y vecinos; y se realizarán juntos como personas, a fin de llevar conjuntamente, con seriedad y paciencia, el sexo, que es difícil y que les ha sido impuesto.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Yo creo que casi todas nuestras tristezas son momentos de tensión que
experimentamos como si se tratara de una parálisis. Porque ya no percibimos
el vivir de nuestros sentidos enajenados, y nos encontramos solos con lo
extraño que ha penetrado en nosotros. Porque se nos arrebata por un instante
todo cuanto nos es familiar, habitual. Y porque nos hallamos en medio de una
transición, en la cual no podemos detenernos.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“If the angel deigns to come, it will be because you have convinced him, not by your tears, but by your humble resolve to be always beginning.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“DIE GAZELLE Gazella Dorcas Verzauberte: wie kann der Einklang zweier erwählter Worte je den Reim erreichen, der in dir kommt und geht, wie auf ein Zeichen. Aus deiner Stirne steigen Laub und Leier, und alles Deine geht schon im Vergleich durch Liebeslieder, deren Worte, weich wie Rosenblätter, dem, der nicht mehr liest, sich auf die Augen legen, die er schließt: um dich zu sehen: hingetragen, als wäre mit Sprüngen jeder Lauf geladen und schösse nur nicht ab, solang der Hals das Haupt ins Horchen hält: wie wenn beim Baden im Wald die Badende sich unterbricht: den Waldsee im gewendeten Gesicht.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Si hubiera consciencia como la nuestra en el seguro animal que viene a nuestro encuentro en otra dirección, nos cogería violentamente y nos haría dar la vuelta con su cambio. Pero su ser es para él infinito, suelto y no mira a su estado, puro como su mirada hacia adelante. Y donde nosotros vemos futuro, allí ve él Todo y a sí mismo en Todo y a salvo para siempre.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“Seni ben her şeyin içinde buluyorum, iyilik ve kardeşlik duyduğum şeylerin içinde, en küçüklerinde tohum olarak güneşleniyorsun, büyüklerinde de büyüklüğünü gösteriyorsun. Güçlerin o tansıklı oyunu budur işte, her şeyin içinden böyle yararcasına geçmeleri: köklerinde büyüyüp dallarında yiterek uçlarında da bu dalların yeniden dirilir gibi.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“To breathe! Oh poem we cannot see!
Pure space exchanged continually
For one’s own being. Counterpoise,
In which I come to be, a rhythm.

Unique wave, whose
Gathering sea I am;
Space won by that least expended
Of all possible seas.

How many of these locations of voids
Were already inward, were within me.
So many of the flows of air are
Like a son to me.

Do you apprehend me, Air? - You,
Already full of my former places?
You, who have been smooth bark,
Curve and leaf of my words?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“So much has been written (both well and poorly) about things that the things themselves no longer hold an opinion but appear only to mark the imaginary point of intersection for certain clever theories. Whoever wants to say anything about them speaks in reality only about the views of his predecessors and lapses into a semipolemical spirit that stands in exact opposition to the naïve productive spirit with which each object wants to be grasped and understood.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life: New Prose Translations

“But they are difficult things with which we have been charged; almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

“Therefore, dear sir, love your solitude and bear with sweet-sounding lamentation the suffering it causes you. For those who are near you are far, you say, and that shows it is beginning to grow wide about you. And when what is near you is far, then your distance is already among the stars and very large; 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 and be considerate of aging people, who fear that being-alone in which you trust.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

“And about feelings: All feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts you. Everything you can think of as you face your childhood, is good. Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn’t intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Shall we break off, then, our ancient friendship
With the great gods, who decline to solicit our favour?
Just because the hard steel which we forge never knew them?
And shall we suddenly search for their whereabouts on a map?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“We have no reason to be mistrustful of our world, for it is not against us. If it holds terrors they are our terrors.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“To understand our being here as one side of being in its entirety and to exhaust it passionately, this would be the demand placed on us by death; while life, as long as one truly admits it, is in every spot all of life.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life: New Prose Translations

“¿Recuerda usted cómo esa vida suya desde la niñez anhelaba llegar a ser "mayor"? Yo veo cómo ahora desde su ser mayor anhela lo aún mayor. Precisamente por eso no deja de ser difícil, pero también por eso no dejará de crecer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Du entfernst dich von mir, du Stunde.
Wunden schlägt mir dein Flügelschlag.
Allein: was soll ich mit meinem Munde?
mit meiner Nacht? mit meinem Tag?
Ich habe keine Geliebte, kein Haus,
keine Stelle auf der ich lebe.
Alle Dinge, an die ich mich gebe,
werden reich und geben mich aus.
[Der Dichter]”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, 88 Gedichte

“Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“His lips were thin and shut tight, and his nostrils trembled slightly. He could move only one of his beautiful dark brown eyes; from time to time, it gazed across at me, tranquil and melancholy, while the other always remained fixed in the same direction, as if it had been sold and there were no longer any point in considering it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“I now understand very well, by the way, that a man will carry, for many a year, deep inside his wallet, the account of a dying hour. It need not even be one especially chosen; they all have something well nigh distinctive about them. Can we not imagine someone copying out, let us say, the manner of Félix Arvers's death? He died in a hospital, at ease and in repose, and the nun perhaps supposed he was closer to death than in fact he was. She called out some instructions or other, in a very loud voice, detailing where this or that was to be found. This nun was quite uneducated; the word ‘corridor’, which she could not avoid using, she had never seen written down, so it happened that she said ‘collidor’, thinking that was how it was pronounced. This decided Arvers to postpone his death. He felt it was necessary to clear the matter up first. He became perfectly lucid, and explained to her that the word was ‘corridor’. Then he died. He was a poet and hated the inexact; or perhaps he was simply concerned with the truth; or else it bothered him that his last impression of the world should be that it was carrying on in this careless fashion. There is no determining which it was. But let no one think it was pedantry. In that case, the same stricture might be brought against the saintly Jean de Dieu, who leaped up from his deathbed and was just in time to cut down a man who had hanged himself in the garden, knowledge of whom had in some miraculous way penetrated the inward tension of the saint's agony. He too was concerned with the truth alone.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Ω, πόσο την πιστεύω την ζωή. Όχι τη ζωή ως χρόνο αλλά εκείνη την άλλη ζωή, τη ζωή των μικρών πραγμάτων, τη ζωή των ζώων και των μεγάλων πεδιάδων. Τη ζωή που συνεχίζει, χιλιετίες τώρα, φαινομενικά αμέτοχη, ισορροπώντας μολαταύτα τις δυνάμεις της γεμάτη κίνηση και ανάπτυξη και ζεστασιά. Γι' αυτό με βαραίνουν τόσο οι πόλεις. Γι' αυτό λατρεύω να διανύω μεγάλες αποστάσεις ξυπόλυτος ώστε να μη χάσω ούτ' έναν κόκκο άμμου, να δίνω στο κορμί μου τον κόσμο ολόκληρο για να τον νιώσει, να τον ζήσει, να δεθεί μαζί του σε διάφορες μορφές.”
― Maria Rilke Rainer

“Suchen Sie die Tiefe der Dinge: dort steigt Ironie nie hinab.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Love at first has nothing to do with unfolding, abandon and uniting with another person (for what would be the sense in a union of what is unrefined and unfinished, still second order?); for the individual it is a grand opportunity to mature, to become a world in himself for another's sake...Only in this sense, as a duty to work on themselves ('to hearken and to hammer day and night'), should young people use the love that is given the,. The unfolding, the abandon and any kind of togetherness is not for them. They are the culmination, and perhaps that for which a human life now is hardly sufficient.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet