Top 100 Rainer Maria Quotes
#1. Rainer Maria Rilke was admittedly not a Dockers tagger, but a sort of European equivalent: a German poet - in many respects, a charlatan masquerading as a genius who turned out to be a genius.
Richard Flanagan
#2. The Western poet Rainer Maria Rilke has said that our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure.12
Sogyal Rinpoche
#3. Rainer Maria Rilke: Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart.
Wesley Hill
#4. Where otherwise words were, flow discoveries, freed all surprised out of the fruit's flesh. RAINER MARIA RILKE
Gayle Brandeis
#5. O stars, isn't it from you that the lover's desire for the face of his beloved arises? Doesn't his secret insight into her pure features come from the pure constellations? - from "The Third Elegy" by Rainer Maria Rilke Fine
Philip Pullman
#6. I think about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke who said that it's the questions that move us, not the answers. As a writer, I believe that it's our task, our responsibility, to hold the mirror up to social injustices that we see and to create a prayer of beauty. The questions serve us in that capacity.
Terry Tempest Williams
#7. How children dance," Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "to the unlived lives of their parents,
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#8. you are ever again the wave sweeping through all things RAINER MARIA RILKE, BOOK OF HOURS
Ram Dass
#9. What is the deepest loss that you have suffered? If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine. - from Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29 Rainer Maria Rilke
Kate Bernheimer
#11. 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
#13. Success, which is something so simple in the end, is made up of thousands of things, we never fully know what.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#14. If there is nothing you can share with other people, try to be close to Things. Things will not abandon you. The nights are still there, and the winds that move through the trees and across many lands. Everything in the world of Things and animals is filled with being, of which you are part.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#15. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#16. Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#17. [A]t bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#18. My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#19. I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#20. Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#22. Think: the hero prolongs himself, even his falling
was only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#23. What we do battle with is so small, what battles us is so large ...
Rainer Maria Rilke
#24. Be indulgent toward those who ... are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#25. I want to mirror your image in its fullest perfection. Never be blind or too old to uphold your weighty wavering reflection
Rainer Maria Rilke
#26. If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches
Rainer Maria Rilke
#27. 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
#28. He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#29. A kind of memory that tells us that what we're now striving for was once nearer and truer and attached to us with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, there it was breath. After the first home the second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#30. Life is cut to allow for growth ... one may vigorously put on weight before one fills it out entirely.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#31. Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner
what is it?
if not the intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#33. May you find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith ...
Rainer Maria Rilke
#34. 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
#35. Be forever dead in Eurydice-more gladly arise into the seamless life proclaimed in your song. Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days, be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#36. 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
#37. We are unutterably alone essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#38. Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#39. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#41. I am like a child who awakes At the light, so safe and secureFree from night's fears when dawn breaks, In Thee I am ever secure.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#42. 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
#44. Is it possible that despite our inventions and progress, despite our culture, religion and knowledge of the world, we have remained on the surface of life?
Rainer Maria Rilke
#45. Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by greater and greater beings.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#48. 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
#49. Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#50. There are moments in which a rose is more important than a piece of bread
Rainer Maria Rilke
#51. It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#52. Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, seperate, in the evening.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#53. A birdsong can even, for a moment, make the whole world into a sky within us, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between its heart and the world's.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#54. I never read anything concerning my work. I feel that criticism is a letter to the public which the author, since it is not directed to him, does not have to open and read.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#55. Whoever you are, go out into the evening,
leaving your room, of which you know every bit;
your house is the last before the infinite,
whoever you are.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#56. Confess to yourself in the deepest hour of the night whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. Dig deep into your heart, where the answer spreads its roots in your being, and ask yourself solemnly, Must I write?
Rainer Maria Rilke
#57. Don't you see that everything that happens is always a beginning again,
Rainer Maria Rilke
#58. Like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#59. Though he works and worries, the farmer
never reaches down to where the seed turns
into summer. The earth grants.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#61. The comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead of possession one learns connection.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#62. Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant ...
Rainer Maria Rilke
#63. Most people have turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#64. 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
#65. What an unilateral life, when from the material of a renunciation, we must fashion something we love.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#66. Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#67. Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again. But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the earth, seems irrevocable.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#68. As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still, it is we who move in infinite space.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#69. A carefree letting go of oneself, not a caution, but a wise blindness.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#70. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#71. Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#72. 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
#73. Books inviting us to read, on the bookshelves stand.
Piers for bridges that will lead, into Fairyland
Rainer Maria Rilke
#75. Bound by conventions, people tend to reach for what is easy. Here we must be unafraid of what is difficult. For all living beings in nature must unfold in their particular way and become themselves despite all opposition.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#76. And 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, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#77. May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#78. Think ... of the world which you carry within yourself ... and set it above everything that you notice about you. Your inmost happening is worth your whole love, that is what you must somehow work at, and not loose too much time and too much courage in explaining your attitude to people.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#79. In those small towns you come to realize how the cathedrals utterly outgrew their whole environment.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#80. 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
#81. Nowhere, beloved, can world be but within us. Our life passes in transformation. And the external dwindles away.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#82. 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
#83. Look: the trees exist; the houses we dwell in stand there stalwartly. Only we pass by it all, like a rush of air. And everything conspires to keep quiet about us, half out of shame perhaps, half out of some secret hope.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#84. Which so incorruptibly reduced a reality to its color content that it resumed a new existence in a beyond of color, without any previous memories.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#85. I have patience for centuries in me and will live as though my time were very big.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#87. It wasn't his, it wasn't my fault, we both had nothing except patience, but Death has none. I saw him come (how meanly!) and I watched him as he took and took: none of it I could claim as mine.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#88. That is the principal thing-not to remain with the dream, with the intention, with the being-in-the-mood, but always forcibly to convert it all into things.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#89. May you gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#90. Earth, my dearest, oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over ... Unspeakably, I have belonged to you, from the flush.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#91. IMPERMANENCE
Driftsand of the hours. Quietly disappearing,
continuously, even the happily consecrated design.
Life blows away, always: pillars already rise
without connection, carrying nothing but empty air.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#92. Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power / formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#93. When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everthing in me that is bewildered and confused.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#94. For sometime now I have believed that it is our own force, all our own force that is still too great for us. It is true that we do not know it; but is it not just that which is most our own of which we know the least?
Rainer Maria Rilke
#95. To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#96. Be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything else ... What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#97. 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
#98. If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#99. Look, we don't love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#100. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
