The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

“For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“A billion stars go spinning through the night,
glittering above your head,
But in you is the presence that will be
when all the stars are dead.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;
I am only one of my many mouths,
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.

I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death’s note wants to climb over—
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of 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

“There is time only to work slowly
There is no time not to love”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Oh hours of childhood,
when behind each shape more than the past appeared
and what streamed out before us was not the future.
We felt our bodies growing and were at times impatient to be grown up, half for the sake
of those with nothing left but their grownupness.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Harshness vanished. A sudden softness has replaced the meadows' wintry grey. Little rivulets of water changed their singing accents. Tendernesses, hesitantly, reach toward the earth from space, and country lanes are showing these unexpected subtle risings that find expression in the empty trees.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“I would like to step out of my heart
And go walking beneath the enormous sky.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“It is nothing but a breath, the void.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“And you suddenly know: It was here!
You pull yourself together, and there
stands an irrevocable year
of anguish and vision and prayer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke: Selected Poems

“Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walk
only on feelings. That faces upward
and in its mirror
receives heavenly roads, which travel
along themselves.
That has learned to walk upon water
when it scoops,
that walks upon wells,
transfiguring every path.
That steps into other hands,
changes those that are like it
into a landscape:
wanders and arrives within them,
fills them with arrival.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a lone one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences.

For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else—); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars, and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that.

You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

- For the Sake of a Single Poem”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.

Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.

To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions...For the god
wants to know himself in you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“The sky puts on the darkening blue coat held for it by a row of ancient trees; you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight, one journeying to heaven, one that falls; and leave you, not at home in either one, not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses, not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes a star each night, and rises; and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel) your life, with its immensity and fear, so that, now bounded, now immeasurable, it is alternately stone in you and star.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all
my fellow creatures, pulsing with your life;
as a tiny seed you sleep in what is small
and in the vast you vastly yield yourself.

The wondrous game that power plays with Things
is to move in such submission through the world:
groping in roots and growing thick in trunks
and in treetops like a rising from the dead.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Why must a man be always taking on Things not his own, as if he were a servant whose marketing-bag grows heavier and heavier from stall to stall and, loaded down, he follows and doesn’t dare ask: Master, why this banquet?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power / formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! –
powers and people –

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Moving Forward"

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can’t reach.
With my sense, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke

“She followed slowly and she needed time,
as though some long ascent were not yet by;
and yet: as though, when she had ceased to climb,
she would no longer merely walk, but fly.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most intimate. From images that are full, the spirit plunges on to others that suddenly must be filled; there are no lakes till eternity. Here, falling is best. To fall from the mastered emotion into the guessed-at, and onward.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Усмихна се. Почти ме заболя.”
― Райнер Мария Рилке, Лирика

“It was then that in all your magnificence
you were not ashamed to know me. Your breath moved tenderly
over my face. And, spread across solemn distances,
your smile entered my heart.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“The road from intensity to greatness passes through sacrifice. —Kassner”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“And surely of all the stars that perished
long ago,
one still exists.
I think that I know
which one it is--
which one, at the end of its beam in the sky,
stands like a white city . . .”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“KLAGE O wie ist alles fern und lange vergangen. Ich glaube, der Stern, von welchem ich Glanz empfange, ist seit Jahrtausenden tot. Ich glaube, im Boot, das vorüberfuhr, hörte ich etwas Banges sagen. Im Hause hat eine Uhr geschlagen … In welchem Haus? … Ich möchte aus meinem Herzen hinaus unter den großen Himmel treten. Ich möchte beten. Und einer von allen Sternen müßte wirklich noch sein. Ich glaube, ich wüßte, welcher allein gedauert hat,— welcher wie eine weiße Stadt am Ende des Strahls in den Himmeln steht …”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Along the sun-drenched roadside, from the great
hollow half-treetrunk, which for generations
has been a trough, renewing in itself
an inch or two of rain, I satisfy
my thirst: taking the water's pristine coolness
into my whole body through my wrists.
Drinking would be too powerful, too clear;
but this unhurried gesture of restraint
fills my whole consciousness with shining water.

Thus, if you came, I could be satisfied
to let my hand rest lightly, for a moment,
lightly, upon your shoulder or your breast.


- Along The Sun-Drenched Roadside, Translated by Stephen Mitchell”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke