New Poems Quotes

“His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems

“This heaviness—toiling on as if bound through a landscape of things forever unfinished, is like the awkward walking of the swan.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems: A Revised Bilingual Edition

“La vie - qui sait? - fut dédaignée peut-être.
Un bonheur était là et fut manqué,
et cette chose en est issue quand même,
faite à tout prix et difficile autant que vivre,
mais pourtant accomplie et belle comme si
l'instant était venu de partir et sourire.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems

“The Rose Window In there: the lazy pacing of their paws creates a stillness that’s almost dizzying; and as one of the cats then suddenly takes the gaze that watches it carelessly and snatches it into its own great eye,— and that gaze, as if caught in a whirlpool’s circle, for a little while stays afloat and then goes under and is lost to oblivion, when this eye, which apparently rests, opens and slams shut with a roaring and yanks it all the way into the blood—: thus in olden times out of the darkness the cathedrals’ great rose windows would seize hearts and drag them in to God.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems: A Revised Bilingual Edition