Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus Quotes

“Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight,
let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.
Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart
fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful,
or a broken string. Let my joyfully streaming face
make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise
and blossom. How dear you will be to me then, you nights
of anguish. Why didn't I kneel more deeply to accept you,
inconsolable sisters, and surrendering, lose myself
in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen,
our season in our inner year--, not only a season
in time--, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil
and home.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“Praise the world to the angel, not what can’t be talked about.
You can’t impress him with your grand emotions. In the grand cosmos
where he so intensely feels, you’re just a novice. So show
him some simple thing shaped for generation after generation
until it lives in our hands and in our eyes, and it’s ours.
Tell him about things. He’ll stand amazed, just as you did
beside the ropemaker in Rome or the potter on the Nile.
Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours;
how even grief’s lament purely determines its own shape,
serves as a thing, or dies in a thing — and escapes
In ecstasy beyond the violin.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“Our own heart always exceeds us.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“But if the endlessly dead awakened a symbol in us,
perhaps they would point to the catkins hanging from the
bare
branches of the hazel-trees, or
would evoke the raindrops that fall onto the dark earth in
springtime.--

And we, who have always thought
of happiness as rising, would feel
the emotion that almost overwhelms us
whenever a happy thing falls.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“We’re involved with flower, fruit, grapevine.
They speak more than the language of the year.
Out of the darkness a blaze of colors appears,
and one perhaps that has the jealous shine

Of the dead, those who strengthen the earth.
What do we know of the part they assume?
It’s long been their habit to marrow the loam
with their own free marrow through and through.

Now the one question: Is it done gladly?
The work of sullen slaves, does this fruit
thrust up, clenched, toward us, its masters?

Sleeping with roots, granting us only
out of their surplus this hybrid made of mute
strength and kisses — are they the masters?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“Like the curved pipe of a fountain, your arching boughs
drive the sap
downward and up again: and almost without awakening
it bursts out of sleep, into its sweetest achievement.
Like the god stepping into the swan.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“Truly being here is glorious.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“You, still the squanderers of the empty hall —
when the twilight comes, wide as woods…
And the chandelier, like a sixteen-pointer, vaults
where nothing can set foot.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“Jubilation knows and Longing grants —
only Lament still learns; with girlish hands
she counts the ancient evil through the nights.

But suddenly, unpracticed and askant,
she lifts one of our voice’s constellations
Into the sky unclouded by her breath.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“Only in the realm of Praising should Lament walk, the naiad of the wept-for fountain, watching over the stream of our complaint, to keep it clear upon the very stone that bears the arch of triumph and the altar.—”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus: A Dual Language Edition

“Though he works and worries, the farmer
never reaches down to where the seed turns
into summer. The earth grants.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“As for myself, what has died for me has died, so to speak, into my own heart: when I looked for him, the person who vanished has collected himself strangely and so surprisingly in me, and it was so moving to feel he was now only there that my enthusiasm for serving his new existence, for deepening and glorifying it, took the upper hand almost at the very moment when pain would otherwise have invaded and devastated the whole landscape of my spirit. When I remember how I—often with the utmost difficulty in understanding and accepting each other—loved my father! Often, in childhood, my mind became confused and my heart grew numb at the mere thought that someday he might no longer be; my existence seemed to me so wholly conditioned through him (my existence, which from the start was pointed in such a different direction!) that his departure was to my innermost self synonymous with my own destruction …, but so deeply is death rooted in the essence of love that (if only we are cognizant of death without letting ourselves be misled by the uglinesses and suspicions that have been attached to it) it nowhere contradicts love: where, after all, can it drive out someone whom we have carried unsayably in our heart except into this very heart, where would the “idea” of this loved being exist, and his unceasing influence (: for how could that cease which even while he lived with us was more and more independent of his tangible presence) … where would this always secret influence be more secure than in us?! Where can we come closer to it, where more purely celebrate it, when obey it better, than when it appears combined with our own voices, as if our heart had learned a new language, a new song, a new strength!

(To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, January 6, 1923)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“Temples are no longer known. It is we who secretly save up
these extravagances of the heart. Where one of them still
survives,
a Thing that was formerly prayed to, worshipped, knelt
before--
just as it is, it passes into the invisible world.
Many no longer perceive it, yet miss the chance
to build it inside themselves now, with pillars and statues:
greater.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“We, when we feel, evaporate”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“we don’t love like the flowers, with just
the force of a single year; when we love
ancient sap is rising.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“N'est-il pas temps
que ceux qui aiment se libèrent de l'objet aimé
et le surmontent, frémissants ? Ainsi le trait
vainc la corde pour être, rassemblé dans le bond,
plus que lui-même. Car nulle part il n'est d'arrêt.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“Pues cerca de la muerte uno ya no ve la muerte y mira fijamente hacia afuera, quizás con una gran mirada de animal.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke , Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus

“This, a world seen no longer from the human point of view, but inside the angel, is perhaps my real task.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus: A Dual Language Edition

“If you were to give yourself over to this angel, Rilke tells the reader, some day, some night, the angel’s light hands kämen denn … dich ringender zu prüfen, und gingen wie Erzürnte durch das Haus und griffen dich als ob sie dich erschüfen und brächen dich aus deiner Form heraus. would come more fiercely to interrogate you, and rush to seize you blazing like a star, and bend you as if trying to create you, and break you open, out of who you are.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus: A Dual Language Edition