Top 100 Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes
#1. 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
#2. But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#3. Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#4. 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
#5. Wanting to change, to improve, a person's situation means offering him, for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced, other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#7. Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#8. Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, seperate, in the evening.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#9. Don't you see that everything that happens is always a beginning again,
Rainer Maria Rilke
#10. Do you recall, from your childhood on, how very much this life of yours has longed for greatness? I see it now, how from the vantage point of greatness it longs for even greater greatness. That is why it does not let up being difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#11. We are the bees of the invisible. We gather the honey of the visible, and store it in the great golden honeycomb of the invisible.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#12. Books inviting us to read, on the bookshelves stand.
Piers for bridges that will lead, into Fairyland
Rainer Maria Rilke
#13. In those small towns you come to realize how the cathedrals utterly outgrew their whole environment.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#14. Draw near to Nature. Then try like some first human being to say what you see and experience and love and lose.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#15. You are also the physician who must watch over yourself. But in the course of every illness there are many days in which the physician can do nothing but wait.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#16. Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power / formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#17. Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way
and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#18. Take the emptiness you hold in your arms
And scatter it into the open spaces we breathe.
Maybe the birds will feel how the air is thinner,
And fly with more affection.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#19. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is-solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#20. Always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#21. 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
#23. Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
... live in the question.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#24. A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#25. Perform no miracles for me, But justify Thy laws to me Which, as the years pass by me. All soundlessly unfold.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#26. He does not always remain bent over the
pages; he often leans back and closes
his eyes over a line he has been reading
again, and its meaning spreads through
his blood.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#27. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#28. Be-and yet know the great void where all things begin, the infinite source of your own most intense vibration, so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#29. Fame - the aggregate of all the misunderstandings that collect around a new name.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#30. The essence of love lies not in communion, but in the fact that each partner forces the other to become something, something infinitely great, the extreme limit of his strength.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#31. So whoever loves must try to act as if he had a great work: he must be much alone and go into himself and collect himself and hold fast to himself; he must work; he must become something!
Rainer Maria Rilke
#32. This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#33. No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others
Rainer Maria Rilke
#34. It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#35. For we, when we feel, evaporate: oh, we
breathe ourselves out and away: from ember to ember,
yielding us fainter fragrance.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#36. For even the best err in words when they are meant to mean most delicate and almost inexpressible things.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#37. 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
#38. To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#39. To write rhythmic prose one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous and multiple rhythm of the blood. Prose needs to be built like a cathedral. There, one is truly without a name, without ambition, without help; on scaffoldings, alone with one's consciousness.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#40. Be ahead of all farewells as if they were behind you, like the winter that is just departing.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#41. If you think your world isn't poetic enough, or exciting enough to tell a story about, that's not because it's a dull world, that's because you're not poet enough to wake its soul up.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#42. I am too alone in the world and not alone enough to make every moment holy.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#43. The deep parts of my life pour onward, as if the river shores were opening out. I feel closer to what language can't reach. With my senses, as with birds, I climb into the windy heaven ... in the ponds broken off from the sky ...
Rainer Maria Rilke
#44. You life will find its own paths ... and that they be good, rich, and wide is what I wish for you, more than I can say.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#45. If it were possible for us to see further than our knowledge extends and out a little over the outworks of our surmising, perhaps we should then bear our sorrows with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new, something unknown, has entered us.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#46. Turn towards great and serious subjects, next to which irony becomes small and helpless.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#47. Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#48. You are the deep innerness of all things,
the last word that can never be spoken.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#49. Society in its wisdom has found ways of constructing refuges of all kinds, for since it has been disposed to make the love-life a pastime, it has also felt obliged to trivialize it, to make it cheap, risk-free and secure, as public pleasures usually are.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#51. You needed your whole self; and so you went and broke yourself, out of its grip, in pieces,painfully, because your need was great.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#52. I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#53. Piously we produce our images of you
till they stand around you like a thousand walls.
And when our hearts would simply open,
our fervent hands hide you.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#54. It is true that many young people who do not love rightly, who simply surrender themselves and leave no room for aloneness, experience the depressing feeling of failure.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#56. Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#57. There are so many things about which some old man ought to tell one while one is little; for when one is grown one would know them as a matter of course.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#58. My art is representational by choice ... if the art of painting is to survive, it must describe and express people, their lives and times. It must communicate.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#59. Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#60. I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#61. You are the partner of her loneliness, the unspeaking center of her monologues. With each disclosure you encompass more and she stretches beyond what limits her, to hold you.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#62. God ... sat down for a moment when the dog was finished in order to watch it ... and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it could not have been made better.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#63. O Lord, give each person his own personal death. / A thing that moves out of the same life he lived, / In which he had love, and intelligence, and trouble.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#64. Society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#65. It almost seems as if autumn were the true creator, more creative than the spring, which is too even-toned, more creative when it comes with its will-to-change and shatters the much too ready-made, self-satisfied and really almost bourgeois-complacent image of summer.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#66. Forest! They seek your trees to sleep among,
With their long sentences hung. Forest!
Rainer Maria Rilke
#67. If your everyday life appears to be unworthy subject matter, do not complain to life. Complain to yourself, Lament that you are not poet enough to call up its wealth.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#68. She was in herself, like a woman near term,
and did not think of the man, going on ahead,
or the path, climbing upwards towards life.
She was in herself. And her being-dead
filled her with abundance.
As a fruit with sweetness and darkness,
so she was full with her vast death.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#69. I don't want to talk to anyone, lest I squander your words' echo, which ripples like a shine over mine and lends their sound a richness.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#70. Animals see the unobstructed world with their whole eyes. But our eyes, turned back upon themselves, encircle and seek to snare the world, setting traps for freedom.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#72. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#73. Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy
of being No-one's sleep under so many
lids.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#75. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confidence in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer
Rainer Maria Rilke
#77. Do not, do not, do not books for ever
hammer at people like perpetual bells?
When, between two books, silent sky appears: be glad
Rainer Maria Rilke
#78. Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#79. But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#80. You are nearing the land that is life; you will recognize it by its seriousness.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#81. My old furniture is rotting in a barn where I was permitted to store it, and as for myself, dear God, I don't have a roof over my head and it is raining into my eyes.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#82. Most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#84. The world of sexuality it finds is not entirely mature and pure, it is not human enough, only virile, rut, intoxication, restlessness, and weighed down by the old prejudices and arrogance with which men have disfigured and overburdened love.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#85. Do you remember how this life of yours longed in childhood to belong to the grown-ups? I can see that it now longs to move on from them and is drawn to those who are greater yet. That is why it does not cease to be difficult, but also why it will not cease to grow.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#86. It seems to me that the only way one can be helpful is to extend one's hand to someone else involuntarily, and without ever knowing how useful this will be.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#87. All who seek you
test you.
And those who find you
bind you to image and gesture.
I would rather sense you
as the earth senses you.
In my ripening
ripens what you are.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#90. O shooting star
that fell into my eyes and through my body-:
not to forget you. To endure.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#91. Works of art are born of those who confront danger, who go to the limit of an experience, to a point beyond which no human can go. The farther one ventures, the more distinctive, the more personal, the more unique life becomes.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#93. Describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty-describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#94. Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#95. Those doves below, the ones utterly cared for, never endangered ones, cannot know tenderness.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#97. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#98. Your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#99. What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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