Letters on Life Quotes

“I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spend in the most profound activity. Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within us during idle days.

In any case, it is very important to be idle with confidence, with devotion, possibly even with joy. The days when even our hands do not stir are so exceptionally quiet that it is hardly possible to raise them without hearing a whole lot.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

“We lead our lives so poorly because we arrive in the present always unprepared, incapable, and too distracted for everything.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

“To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one.”
― Rilke, Rainer Maria, Letters on Life

“Nothing makes it more difficult to help than the intention of doing so.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

“I confess that I consider life to be a thing of the most untouchable deliciousness, and that even the confluence of so many disasters and deprivations, the exposure of countless fates, everything that insurmountably increased for us over the past few years to become a still rising terror cannot distract me from the fullness and goodness of existence that is inclined toward us.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

“Fame is nothing but the sum of all the misunderstandings that cluster around a new name…Wherever a human achievement becomes truly great, it seeks to hide its face in the lap of general, nameless greatness.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

“Wishes are memories coming from our future!”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

“You have to live life to the limit, not according to each day but according to its depth. One does not have to do what comes next if one feels a greater affinity with that which happens later, at a remove, even in a remote distance. One may dream while others are saviors if these dreams are more real to oneself than reality and more necessary than bread. In a word: one ought to turn the most extreme possibility inside oneself into the measure for one’s life, for our life is vast and can accommodate as much future as we are able to carry.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

“Art is childhood.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

“As soon as two people have resolved to give up their togetherness, the resulting pain with its heaviness or particularity is already so completely part of the life of each individual that the other has to sternly deny himself to become sentimental and feel pity. The beginning of the agreed-upon separation is marked precisely by this pain, and its first challenge will be that this pain already belongs separately to each of the two individuals. This pain is an essential condition of what the now solitary and most lonely individual will have to create in the future out of his reclaimed life. If two people managed not to get stuck in hatred during their honest struggles with each other, that is, in the edges of their passion that became ragged and sharp when it cooled and set, if they could stay fluid, active, flexible, and changeable in all of their interactions and relations, and, in a word, if a mutually human and friendly consideration remained available to them, then their decision to separate cannot easily conjure disaster and terror. When it is a matter of a separation, pain should already belong in its entirety to that other life from which you wish to separate. Otherwise the two individuals will continually become soft toward each other, causing helpless and unproductive suffering. In the process of a firmly agreed-upon separation, however, the pain itself constitutes an important investment in the renewal and fresh start that is to be achieved on both sides. People in your situation might have to communicate as friends. But then these two separated lives should remain without any knowledge of the other for a period and exist as far apart and as detached from the other as possible. This is necessary for each life to base itself firmly on its new requirements and circumstances. Any subsequent contact (which may then be truly new and perhaps very happy) has to remain a matter of unpredictable design and direction. If you find that you scare yourself.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

“Each time we cast our view toward distances that have not yet been touched, we transform not only the present moment and the one following but also alter the past within us.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

“No one would dream of expecting a single individual to be "happy"—once someone is married, however, everyone is very astonished when he is not happy!”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

“The longer i live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed into magnificent sense.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

“And the loneliest people above all contribute most to commonality. I have said before that in this vast melody of life, some learn more, some less; therefore, in this big orchestra, everyone has his own role. The one who can perceive the entire melody is at the same time the loneliest and the closest to commonality. He would perceive all that it is not allowed to others, as he would understand in his completeness what the others can only eavesdrop in the darkness of a space full of emptiness. - Rainer Maria Rilke, from “On Solitude,” Letters On Life (Modern Library; Reprint edition, April 11, 2006) Orignally published 2005.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

“It is quite rare to encounter a truly creative and productive person who resides in his own stillness or simply in the midst of his melody, close to the honest beating of his heart!”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

“There is no more wretched prison than the fear of hurting someone who loves you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life: New Prose Translations

“Do not believe that the person who is trying to offer you solace lives his life effortlessly among the simple and quiet words that might occasionally comfort you. His life is filled with much hardship and sadness, and it remains far behind yours. But if it were otherwise, he could never have found these words.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life: New Prose Translations

“There exist relationships that must amount to a very great and almost unbearable happiness, but they can take place only between people blessed with abundance and between individuals each one of whom is rich, focused, and mindful; they can be united only by two expansive, deep, and individual worlds.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life: New Prose Translations

“Art means to be oblivious to the fact that the world already exists and to create one.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life: New Prose Translations

“We often decide in advance how we will respond to something rather than wait for the experience to play itself out according to its proper speed.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life: New Prose Translations

“You know that I am not one of those individuals who neglect their body in order to turn it into an offering for their soul; my soul would not at all have appreciated such a sacrifice.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life: New Prose Translations

“Above all marriage is a new task and a new seriousness—a new challenge and a question regarding the strength and kindness of each participant and a new great danger for both.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

“To be close to another person who holds opposing views while being a deep, committed friend can be a wonderful, shaping influence.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life: New Prose Translations

“Empathy is humility, imitation is vanity—and thus it ought to be possible soon to notice whether one intends one or the other.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life: New Prose Translations

“love is nothing but the urgent and blessed appeal for another person to be beautiful, abundant, great, intense, unforgettable; nothing but the surging commitment for him to amount to something.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life: New Prose Translations

“For our life is vast and can accommodate as much future as we are able to carry.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

“While they mean to please each other, they touch each other only impatiently and in a dominating manner. And in the effort to escape from the intolerable and unbearable condition of their confusion, they commit the greatest mistake that can be made within a relationship: they become impatient.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life: New Prose Translations

“Who among us would not have to strive for this above everything else: to reach such security in one’s ability that one has always the correct counterweights ready within one’s conscience to offset the judgment that arrives from the outside.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life: New Prose Translations

“All things exist in order to become images for us in some sense. And this does not cause them any harm: for while they express us ever more clearly, our soul bows down to them to the same degree.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life: New Prose Translations

“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