Poetry Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

#1. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#2. Amid these fading and decaying things, be the glass that rings out as it's breaking.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#3. Someday you will name me,
then gently place those burning
holy roses in my hair.
[Songs of Longing]

Rainer Maria Rilke

#4. I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough

Rainer Maria Rilke

#5. And if the world has forgotten you,
say this to the stable earth: I run.
Tell the rushing water: I exist.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#6. Insomnia

I wonder
If those talks matter
Few done in the clarity of day
Or the many
Done at 3 a.m. in the morning

Irum Zahra

#7. If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#8. The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#9. Around everything that is perfected, the unfinished ascends and intensifies.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#10. Most events are inexpressible, and take place in a sphere that no word has ever entered. Most inexpressible of all are works of art, existences full of secrets whose life continues alongside ours, while ours is transitory.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#11. We want it visible
to show
when even the most
visible joy
will reveal itself
only when we have
transformed it within.
there's nowhere, my love, the
world can exist
expect within.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#12. Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#13. Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#14. Every angel is terrifying.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#15. We need to make sure that leaks of classified information, of national security secrets, needs to be rigorously pursued and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

John O. Brennan

#16. Read the lines as if they were unknown to you, and you will feel in your inmost self how very much they are yours.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#17. The man of character, sensitive to the meaning of what he is doing, will know how to discover the ethical paths in the maze of possible behavior.

Earl Warren

#18. This is biblical ethics. It has little to do with the middle-class ethics of avoiding a few things which are supposed to be wrong and doing a few things which are supposed to be right. Biblical ethics means standing in ultimate decisions for or against God.

Paul Tillich

#19. If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#20. Not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#21. Isn't it time that, loving, we freed ourselves
from the beloved, and, trembling, endured:
as the arrow endures the bow, so as to be,
in its flight, something more than itself?

Rainer Maria Rilke

#22. I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#23. All that we have gained, the machine threatens-
once a tool assumes a force of its own.
Instead of letting us get used to mastery, for buildings more severe it cuts the stone.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#24. Isn't it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours
grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves
from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived:
the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string
to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#25. For even the best err in words when they are meant to mean most delicate and almost inexpressible things.

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. Art too is just a way of living.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#28. The only way I'll ever run a marathon is if I'm involved in the administration.

Sally Phillips

#29. All things want to float.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#30. 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

#31. Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power / formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#32. Isn't it time that, in love, we freed ourselves
from the loved one and, trembling, endured:
as the arrow endures the string, collecting itself
to be more than itself as it shoots?

Rainer Maria Rilke