Rainer Maria Rilke > Quotes

“Be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again;”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“How should we be able to forget those myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilka

“I would like to sing someone to sleep,
to sit beside someone and be there.
I would like to rock you and sing softly
and go with you to and from sleep.
I would like to be the one in the house
who knew: The night was cold.
And I would like to listen in and listen out
into you, into the world, into the woods.
The clocks shout to one another striking,
and one sees to the bottom of time.
And down below one last, strange man walks by
and rouses a strange dog.
And after that comes silence.
I have laid my eyes upon you wide;
and they hold you gently and let you go
when something stirs in the dark.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“I’m too alone in the world, yet not alone enough
to make each hour holy.
I’m too small in the world, yet not small enough
to be simply in your presence, like a thing—
just as it is.

I want to know my own will
and to move with it.
And I want, in the hushed moments
when the nameless draws near,
to be among the wise ones—
or alone.

I want to mirror your immensity.
I want never to be too weak or too old
to bear the heavy, lurching image of you.

I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed,
for where I am closed, I am false.
I want to stay clear in your sight.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“To be loved means to be consumed. To love means to radiate with inexhaustible light. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Most of my life has been spent not understanding, and I can assure you, it was not easy.”
― Rilke

“And I circle ten thousand years long; And I still don't know if I'm a falcon, a storm, or an unfinished song.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Art too is just a way of living.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“That is fundamentally the only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things that can befall us”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“And when you realize that their activities are shabby, that their vocations are petrified and no longer connected with life, why not then continue to look upon it all as a child would, as if you were looking at something unfamiliar, out of the depths of your own solitude, which is itself work and status and vocation? Why should you want to give up a child’s wise not-understanding in exchange for a defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstanding that can gather around a new name.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“But suppose the endlessly dead were to
wake in us some emblem:
they might point to the catkins hanging
from the empty hazel trees, or direct
us to the rain
descending on black earth in early
spring. ---

And we, who always think of happiness
rising, would feel the emotion
that almost baffles us
when a happy thing falls.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“This is the creature there has never been.
They never knew it, and yet, none the less,
they loved the way it moved, its suppleness,
its neck, its very gaze, mild and serene.

Not there, because they loved it, it behaved
as though it were. They always left some space.
And in that clear unpeopled space they saved
it lightly reared its head, with scarce a trace

of not being there. They fed it, not with corn,
but only with the possibility
of being. And that was able to confer

such strength, its brow put forth a horn. One horn.
Whitely it stole up to a maid - to be
within the silver mirror and in her.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Then suddenly you’re left all alone
with your body that can’t love you
and your will that can’t save you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“O how all things are far removed
and long have passed away.
I do believe the star,
whose light my face reflects,
is dead and has been so
for many thousand years.

I had a vision of a passing boat
and heard some voices saying disquieting things.
I heard a clock strike in some distant house...
but in which house?...

I long to quiet my anxious heart
and stand beneath the sky's immensity.
I long to pray...
And one of all the stars
must still exist.
I do believe that I would know
which one alone
endured,
and which like a white city stands
at the ray's end shining in the heavens. ”
― Rilke Rainer Maria

“Often when I imagine you,
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer,
and I am dark;
I am forest.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“In their new personal development the girl and the woman will only be for a short time imitations of the good and bad manners of man and reiterations of man's professions. After the uncertainty of this transition it will appear that women have passed through those many, often ridiculous, changes of disguise, only to free themselves from the disturbing influence of the other sex. For women, in whom life tarries and dwells in a more incommunicable, fruitful and confident form, must at bottom have become richer beings, more ideally human beings than fundamentally easy-going man, who is not drawn down beneath the surface of life by the difficulty of bearing bodily fruit, and who arrogantly and hastily undervalues what he means to love. When this humanity of woman, borne to the full in pain and humiliation, has stripped off in the course of the changes of its outward position the old convention of simple feminine weakness, it will come to light, and man, who cannot yet feel it coming, will be surprised and smitten by it. One day—a day of which trustworthy signs are already speaking and shining forth especially in northern lands—one day that girl and woman will exist, whose name will no longer mean simply a contrast to what is masculine, but something for itself, something that will not make one think of any supplement or limit, but only of life and existence—the feminine human beings.

This advance, at first very much against the will of man who has been overtaken—will alter the experience of love, which is now full of error, will change it radically and form it into a relationship, no longer between man and woman, but between human being and human being. And this more human love, which will be carried out with infinite consideration and gentleness and will be good and clean in its tyings and untyings, will be like that love which we are straining and toiling to prepare, the love which consists in this, that two lonely beings protect one another, border upon one another and greet one another.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Put out my eyes, and I can see you still;
slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet;
and without any feet can go to you;
and tongueless, I can conjure you at will.
Break off my arms, I shall take hold of you
and grasp you with my heart as with a hand;
arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true;
and if you set this brain of mine afire,
upon my blood I then will carry you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours

“Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of. Everything passes into it now. I don’t know what happens there.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: A Novel

“You are nearing the land that is life; you will recognize it by its seriousness.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“We make our way through Everything like thread passing through fabric, giving shape to images that we ourselves do not know.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“But not you, O girl, nor yet his
mother,
stretched his eyebrows so fierce with
expectation.
Not for your mouth, you who hold him
now,
did his lips ripen into these fervent
contours.
Do you really think your quiet
footsteps
could have so convulsed him, you who
move like dawn wind?
True, you startled his heart; but older
terrors
rushed into him with that first jolt
to his emotions.
Call him . . . you'll never quite
retrieve him from those dark consorts.
Yes, he wants to, he escapes; relieved,
he makes a home
in your familiar heart, takes root
there and begins himself anew.
But did he ever begin himself?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“Someday you will name me,
then gently place those burning
holy roses in my hair.

[Songs of Longing]”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rainer Maria Rilke - Sämtliche Werke

“You, God, who live next door--

If at times, through the long night, I trouble you
with my urgent knocking--
this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom.
I know you're all alone in that room.
If you should be thirsty, there's no one
to get you a glass of water.
I wait listening, always. Just give me a sign!
I'm right here...

Sen komşu tanrı,
Uzun geceler bazen,
Kapına vura vura uyandırıyorsam seni
Solumanı seyrek duyduğumdandır...
Bilirim, yalnızsın odanda.
Sana birşey gerekse kimse yok,
Bir yudum su versin aradığında.
Hep dinlerim, yeter ki bir ses edin,
Öyle yakınım sana...”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“THE UNICORN: The saintly hermit, midway through his prayers
stopped suddenly, and raised his eyes to witness
the unbelievable: for there before him stood
the legendary creature, startling white, that
had approached, soundlessly, pleading with his eyes.

The legs, so delicately shaped, balanced a
body wrought of finest ivory. And as
he moved, his coat shone like reflected moonlight.
High on his forehead rose the magic horn, the sign
of his uniqueness: a tower held upright
by his alert, yet gentle, timid gait.

The mouth of softest tints of rose and grey, when
opened slightly, revealed his gleaming teeth,
whiter than snow. The nostrils quivered faintly:
he sought to quench his thirst, to rest and find repose.
His eyes looked far beyond the saint's enclosure,
reflecting vistas and events long vanished,
and closed the circle of this ancient mystic legend.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“And these things
that keep alive on departure know that
you praise them; transient,
they look to us, the most transient,
to be their rescue.
They want us to change them completely,
in our invisible hearts,
into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever,
finally, we may be.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies