The Poet's Guide to Life Quotes

“Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“One must never despair upon losing something, whether it is an individual or an experience of joy or happiness; everything returns even more magnificently. What has to decline, declines; what belongs to us, stays with us, for everything works according to laws that are greater than our capacity for understanding and that only seem to contradict us. You have to live within yourself and think of all of life, all of its millions of possibilities, openings, and futures in relation to which there exists nothing that is past or has been lost.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“The more one is, the more abundant is everything one experiences. If you want to have a deep love in your life, you must save up for it and collect and gather honey.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“What we all need most urgently now: to realize that transience is not separation—for we, transient as we are, have it in common with those who have passed from us, and they and we exist together in one being where separation is just as unthinkable. Could we otherwise understand such poems if they had been nothing but the utterance of someone who was going to be dead in the future? Don’t such poems continually address inside of us, in addition to what is found there now, also something unlimited and unrecognizable? I do not think that the spirit can make itself anywhere so small that it would concern only our temporal existence and our here and now: where it surges toward us there we are the dead and the living all at once.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“I have by now grown accustomed, to the degree that this is humanly possible, to grasp everything that we may encounter according to its particular intensity without worrying much about how long it will last. Ultimately, this may be the best and most direct way of expecting the utmost of everything—even its duration. If we allow an encounter with a given thing to be shaped by this expectation that it may last, every such experience will be spoiled and falsified, and ultimately it will be prevented from unfolding its most proper and authentic potential and fertility. All the things that cannot be gained through our pleading can be given to us only as something unexpected, something extra: this is why I am yet again confirmed in my belief that often nothing seems to matter in life but the longest patience.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“just like the moon, life surely has a side that is perpetually turned away from us and which is not its opposite but adds to its perfection and completeness, to the truly intact and full sphere of being.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“And yet life is transformation: all that is good is transformation and all that is bad as well. For this reason he is in the right who encounters everything as something that will not return. It does not matter whether he then forgets or remembers, as long as he had been fully present only for its duration and been the site, the atmosphere, the world for what happened, as long as it happened within him, in his center, whatever is good and what is bad—then he really has nothing else to fear because something else of renewed significance is always about to happen next.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“But everything that we encounter is so very much of one piece, and so intimately related to everything else, and has given birth to itself, grows, and is then raised so much to come into its own, that we basically just need to be there, if only unassumingly, if only authentically, the way the earth is there in its affirmation of the seasons, light and dark and wholly in space, longing to be supported by nothing but that web of influences and forces where the stars feel secure.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“It is good to hear all of this and to see it and to seize it, not to become numb toward it but on the contrary: everything is to be felt in countless ways in all its variations yet without losing ourselves to it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“Beauty will become paltry and insignificant when one looks for it only in what is pleasing; there it might be found occasionally but it resides and lies awake in each thing where it encloses itself, and it emerges only for the individual who believes that it is present everywhere and who will not move on until he has stubbornly coaxed it forth.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“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.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“Even on days when fate wishes to bestow boundless gifts on them, most people make mistakes in accepting: they don’t accept straightforwardly and consequently lose something while doing so, they take with a secondary purpose in mind, or they accept what is given to them as if they were being compensated for something else.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“In his poetry and prose, Rilke links through various images the affairs of human life to the movements of the cosmos itself. If this conceit seems hyperbolic, it is for Rilke rooted very deeply in his experiences of the world. The result is not esoteric, nor does it relativize and thus implicitly belittle human activity by placing it within a greater, superior—not divine—order. By seeing things rather within a larger, natural (rather than ideological or religious) pattern, Rilke achieves a fundamentally modern secular perspective but does not give up on the possibility that there might be something greater in our lives. Interestingly, Rilke finds evidence of a connectedness to larger, cosmic patterns within our physical, bodily existence. How we breathe, eat, sleep, digest, and love; how we suffer physically or experience pleasure: we are subject to rhythms we cannot totally control. Rilke relies on no ideational frame but understands our existence as that of decidedly earthly, embodied mortals or, in the language of the philosophers whose work he so significantly shaped and inspired, as beings in time.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“Rilke points out that we can be shaken by losses and by gains, that we may be unsettled as much by negative encounters, adversity, difficulty, illness, loss, and death as by the peculiar intensification of our being in the experience of joy, friendship, creation, and, especially, love. He also stresses that during those experiences, even when they bring us closer to others, we are fundamentally alone. During such moments, when our life is suddenly open to questioning, we are cast back on ourselves without support from any outside agency. Every rite of passage—birth, adolescence, love, commitment, illness, loss, death—marks such an experience where we are faced with our solitude. But this is not a melancholic thought for Rilke. He revalorizes solitude as the occasion to reconsider our decisions and experiences, and to understand ourselves more accurately—and his words can serve as uncannily apt guides for such reflection.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“Is it not peculiar that nearly all of the great philosophers and psychologists have always paid attention to the earth and nothing but the earth? Would it not be more sublime to lift our eyes from this crumb, and instead of considering a speck of dust in the universe, to turn our attention to space itself?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“In marriage, the point is not to achieve a rapid union by tearing down and toppling all boundaries. Rather, in a good marriage each person appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude and thus shows him the greatest faith he can bestow. The being-together of two human beings is an impossibility; where it nonetheless seems to be present it is a limitation, a mutual agreement that robs one or both parts of their fullest freedom and development. Yet once it is recognized that even among the closest people there remain infinite distances, a wonderful coexistence can develop once they succeed in loving the vastness between them that affords them the possibility of seeing each other in their full gestalt before a vast sky!”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“Do you see . . . So this is what one ought to be capable of at some point. Not to wait (which is what has been happening until now) for powerful things and good days to turn you into something but to preempt them and to be it yourself already: this is what one ought to be capable of at some point.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“The more human we become, the more different we become.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“Ultimately nobody can help anyone else in life; one has this recurring experience in every conflict and confusion: that one is alone. This is not as bad as it may appear at first glance; it is also the best thing about life that everyone contains everything within himself: his fate, his future, his entire scope and world.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“We have to be committed not to miss or neglect any opportunity to suffer, to have an experience, or to be happy; our soul arises refreshed from all of that. It has a resting place at those heights that are difficult to reach, and it is at home where one can advance no further: up there we have to carry it. But as soon as we put it down for dead at those extreme spots it awakens and takes flight into skies and celestial depths that from now on belong to us.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“Frequently, when we are frozen by an event or if an event sheds its leaves and petals in front of our eyes in some other violent way, we dig up the soil around it in horror and shrink back from the ugliness of its roots where that which looks to us like transience lives. We have such a limited capacity to be just toward all phenomena and we are so quick to call ugly, as if turning spitefully and vengefully against ourselves, anything that simply does not correspond to the notion of beauty to which we subscribe at that moment.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“We let go of one or the other always yet again: this joyfulness and that sadness. We still do not own either of them.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

“Seeing is for us the most authentic possibility of acquiring something. If god had only made our hands to be like our eyes—so ready to grasp, so willing to relinquish all things—then we could truly acquire wealth. We do not acquire wealth by letting something remain and wilt in our hands but only by letting everything pass through their grasp as if through the festive gate of return and homecoming. Our hands ought not to be a coffin for us but a bed sheltering the twilight slumber and dreams of the things held there, out of whose depths their dearest secrets speak. Once out of our hands, however, things ought to move forward, now sturdy and strong, and we should keep nothing of them but the courageous morning melody that hovers and shimmers behind their fading steps.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke