Rainer Maria Rilke > Quotes

“Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“For our part, when we feel, we
evaporate; ah, we breathe
ourselves out and away; with each new
heartfire
we give off a fainter scent. True,
someone may tell us:
you're in my blood, this room, Spring
itself
is filled with you . . . To what end?
He can't hold us,
we vanish within him and around him.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing . . . then you are a writer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke "Letters to a Young Poet."

“You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“It's ridiculous. Here I sit in my little room, I, Brigge, who have got to be twenty-eight years old and about whom no one knows. I sit here and am nothing. And yet this nothing begins to think and thinks, up five flights of stairs, these thoughts on a gray Paris afternoon:

Is it possible, this nothing thinks, that one has not yet seen, recognized, and said anything real and important? Is it possible that one has had thousands of years of time to look, reflect, and write down, and that one has let the millennia pass away like a school recess in which one eats one's sandwich and an apple?
Yes, it is possible.

...Is it possible that in spite of inventions and progress, in spite of culture, religion, and worldly wisdom, that one has remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that one has even covered this surface, which would at least have been something, with an incredibly dull slipcover, so that it looks like living-room furniture during the summer vacation?
Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that the whole history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that the past is false because one has always spoken of its masses, as if one was telling about a coming together of many people, instead of telling about the one person they were standing around, because he was alien and died?
Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that one believed one has to make up for everything that happened before one was born? Is it possible one would have to remind every single person that he arose from all earlier people so that he would know it, and not let himself be talked out of it by the others, who see it differently?
Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that all these people know very precisely a past that never was? Is it possible that everything real is nothing to them; that their life takes its course, connected to nothing, like a clock in an empty room?
Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that one knows nothing about girls, who are nevertheless alive? Is it possible that one says "the women", "the children", "the boys", and doesn't suspect (in spite of all one's education doesn't suspect) that for the longest time these words have no longer had a plural, but only innumerable singulars?
Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that there are people who say "God" and think it is something they have in common? Just look at two schoolboys: one buys himself a knife, and the same day his neighbor buys one just like it. And after a week they show each other their knives and it turns out that they bear only the remotest resemblance to each other-so differently have they developed in different hands (Well, the mother of one of them says, if you boys always have to wear everything out right away). Ah, so: is it possible to believe that one could have a God without using him?
Yes, it is possible.

But, if all this is possible, has even an appearance of possibility-then for heaven's sake something has to happen. The first person who comes along, the one who has had this disquieting thought, must begin to accomplish some of what has been missed; even if he is just anyone, not the most suitable person: there is simply no one else there. This young, irrelevant foreigner, Brigge, will have to sit himself down five flights up and write, day and night, he will just have to write, and that will be that.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“We discover that we do not know our role; we look for a mirror; we want to remove our make-up and take off what is false and real. But somewhere a piece of disguise that we forgot still sticks to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our mouth are bent. And so we walk around, a mockery and a mere half: neither having achieved being nor actors.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“You have had many and great sadnesses, which passed. And you say that even this passing was hard for you and put you out of sorts. But, please, consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change when you were sad?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“There is only one journey. Going inside yourself.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“A complete sharing between two people is an impossibility and whenever it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a mutual agreement which robs either one member or both of his fullest freedom and development. But, once the realization is accepted that, even between the closest human beings, infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Do not allow yourself to be misled by the surfaces of things.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Perhaps then, some day 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

“Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.

- Sonnets To Orpheus, Part Two, XII”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“Lass dir Alles geschehn: Schönheit und Schrecken.
Man muss nur gehn: Kein Gefühl ist das fernste.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy
of being No-one's sleep under so many
lids.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“You, darkness, of whom I am born- I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes the rest.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours—that is what you must be able to attain.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“There are a large number of people in the room, but one is unaware of them. They are in the books. At times they move among the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsay able than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“You see, I want a lot.
Maybe I want it all:
the darkness of each endless fall,
the shimmering light of each ascent.
So many are alive who don't seem to care.
Casual, easy, they move in the world
as though untouched.
But you take pleasure in the faces
of those who know they thirst.
You cherish those
who grip you for survival.
You are not dead yet, it's not too late
to open your depths by plunging into them
and drink in the life
that reveals itself quietly there.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“If there were a place that we didn't know of, and there,
on some unsayable carpet, lovers displayed
what they never could bring to mastery here – the bold
exploits of their high-flying hearts,
their towers of pleasure, their ladders
that have long since been standing where there was no ground, leaning
just on each other, trembling, - and could master all this,
before the surrounding spectators, the innumerable soundless dead:
Would these, then, throw down their final, forever saved-up,
forever hidden, unknown to us, eternally valid
coins of happiness before the at last
genuinely smiling pair on the gratified carpet?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“A kind of memory that tells us
that what we're now striving for was
once
nearer and truer and attached to us
with infinite tenderness. Here all is
distance,
there it was breath. After the first
home
the second one seems draughty and
strangely sexed.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“Look, I am living. On what? Neither
childhood nor future
lessens . . . . Superabundant existence
wells in my heart.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“weren’t you always
distracted by expectation, as if every event
announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place
to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)…”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room, where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let it go...”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images