My loving friend, you see, my life was never given a foundation, no one was able to imagine what it would want to become. In Venice there stands the so-called Ca del Duca, a princely foundation, on which later the most wretched tenement came to be built. With me it's the opposite: the beautiful arched elevations of my spirit rest on the most tentative beginning; a wooden scaffolding, a few boards....Is that why I feel inhibited in raising the nave, the tower to which the weight of the great bells is to be hoisted (by angels, who else could do it)?
Rainer Maria RilkeBelieve in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.
Rainer Maria RilkeIf you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance.
Rainer Maria RilkeBut you, divine poet, you sang on till the end as the swarm of rejected maenads attacked you, shrieking, you overpowered their noise with harmony, and from pure destruction arose your transfigured song.
Rainer Maria RilkeIt is possible I am pushing through solid rock, like the vein of ore encased, alone. I am such a long way in I can see no way through and no space. Everything is close to my face and everything close to my face is stone. I don't have much knowledge yet in grief, so this darkness makes me feel small. You, be the Master; Make yourself fierce; break in. And then your great transforming will happen to me And my great grief cry will happen to you.
Rainer Maria Rilke