Top 100 Rilke's Quotes
#1. Fragments of a conversation she had left a little earlier (on Rilke, not Rilke's poetry but Rilke the man, who refused to be psychoanalyzed for fear of purging his genius);
William Gaddis
#2. The Letters to a young poet illustrate perfectly the kindliness, the complexity, and at the same time the impersonality and remoteness of Rilke's manner with unknown correspondents.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#3. I feel it now: there's a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has need me..
Rainer Maria Rilke
#4. Don't you see that everything that happens is always a beginning again,
Rainer Maria Rilke
#5. We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.
George Steiner
#6. Be, in this immensity of night, the magic force at your sense's crossroad ...
Rainer Maria Rilke
#7. Where otherwise words were, flow discoveries, freed all surprised out of the fruit's flesh. RAINER MARIA RILKE
Gayle Brandeis
#8. 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
#9. But sing, when you must, of great lovers:
their fame has a long way to go before it's really immortal.
Those you almost envied, the unrequited, whom you found
more loving than the gratified, the content -
begin again and again the praise you can never fully express.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#10. Look, lovers: almost separately they come towards us through the flowery grass and slowly; parting's so far from thought of, they indulge the extravagance of walking unembraced.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb creatures in the world's full reserve, the unsayable sums, joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#14. That's love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#15. I know, that Rilke quote - "Beauty is the beginning of terror" - I think about that a lot. It's that realization that we are so small, and yet we are so large in our capacity to relate to the beauty of things.
Terry Tempest Williams
#16. This resembles the slow discipline of art: it's the work that Rembrandt did, that Picasso and Yeats and Rilke and Bach did. Bucket work implies much more discipline than most men realize.
Robert Bly
#17. For somewhere reigns an old hostility / between living one's Life and doing one's Work.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#18. And many a day's hours were like that.
As if someone fashioned my likeness somewhere
in order to torment it slowly with needles.
I felt each sharp prick of his playing,
and it was: as if a rain fell on me
in which all things change.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#19. The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person's solitude.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. The comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead of possession one learns connection.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#25. Though he works and worries, the farmer
never reaches down to where the seed turns
into summer. The earth grants.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#26. 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
#27. In spite of all the farmer's work and worry, he can't reach down to where the seed is slowly transmuted into summer. The earth bestows.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#28. Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting
still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation.
When something's let go of, it circles; and though we are
rarely the center
of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous
curve.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#29. Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#30. Amid these fading and decaying things, be the glass that rings out as it's breaking.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#31. Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#32. You are not too old
and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out
it's own secret
Rainer Maria Rilke
#33. No waiting the beyond, no peering toward it,
but longing to degrade not even death;
we shall learn earthliness, and serve its ends,
to feel its hands about us like a friend's.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#34. If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#35. I would describe myself like a landscape I've studied at length, in detail; like a word I'm coming to understand; like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime; like my mother's face; like a ship that carried me when the waters raged.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#36. What poet's persuasion can reconcile the length of those days with the brevity of life?
Rainer Maria Rilke
#37. 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
#38. The artist's task consists of making one thing of many, and a
world from the smallest part of a thing.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. It's possible, I'm moving through the hard veins of heavy mountains, like an arc, alone; I'm so deep inside, I see no end in sight, and no distance: everything is getting near and everything near is turning to stone.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#43. Now, as Rilke would say, let's eat us
some effing panther and swan, shall we?
Jason Bredle
#44. Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy
of being No-one's sleep under so many
lids.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#45. Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#46. 154Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#47. Long you must suffer, knowing not what,
until suddenly out of spitefully chewed fruit your suffering's taste comes forth in you.
Then you will love almost instantly what's tasted. No one will ever talk you out of it.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#48. No, no, one can imagine nothing in the world, not the least thing. Everything is composed of so many isolated details that are not to be foreseen. In one's imagining one passes over them and hasty as one is doesn't notice that they are missing. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#50. The artist's experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#51. One has to be able at every moment to place one's hand on the earth like the first human being.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#54. 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
#55. Life is cut to allow for growth ... one may vigorously put on weight before one fills it out entirely.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Be indulgent toward those who ... are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#63. What we do battle with is so small, what battles us is so large ...
Rainer Maria Rilke
#64. Think: the hero prolongs himself, even his falling
was only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#65. May you find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith ...
Rainer Maria Rilke
#66. Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#67. 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
#68. My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#69. [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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Success, which is something so simple in the end, is made up of thousands of things, we never fully know what.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#75. 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
#77. Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by greater and greater beings.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, seperate, in the evening.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#82. It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#83. There are moments in which a rose is more important than a piece of bread
Rainer Maria Rilke
#84. Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#85. 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
#88. The ghosts of Rilke and Wordsworth
along with the 300+ MFA programs, which now seem to employ all Living Poets
have misled the American public egregiously into thinking that poets are morally pure and/or useless.
Katy Lederer
#89. 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
#90. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#95. 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
#96. Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#97. We are unutterably alone essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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