Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing . . . then you are a writer.

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.

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.

Of all my books, I find only a few indispensible.

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust.

Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.

We are the bees of the invisible. We madly gather the honey of the visible to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.

There are moments in which a rose is more important than a piece of bread

with poems one accomplishes so little when one writes them early. One should hold off and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, right at the end, one could perhaps write ten lines that are good.

You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house - , and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon, - you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening.

Thus we live, forever taking leave.

Never believe fate is more than the condensation of childhood.

Stand up during supper and walk outdoors, and keep on walking.

Fate loves to invent patterns and designs. Its difficulty lies in complexity. But life itself is difficult because of its simplicity. It has only a few things of a grandeur not fit for us.

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.

And do not change. Do not divert your love from visible things. But go on loving what is good, simple and ordinary; animals and things and flowers, and keep the balance true.

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.

And isn't the whole world yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept. You felt in such complete harmony with God, when every morning you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could have their turn. You thought it would be shabby to save them and repair them; you used them up and held out your hands, again and again, for more world. For your love was equal to everything.

Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand always already quite near its transformation.

Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divinings, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.

If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.

More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed.

I am too alone in the world and not alone enough to make every moment holy.

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,as if orchards were dying high in space.Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."And tonight the heavy earth is fallingaway from all other stars in the loneliness.We're all falling. This hand here is falling.And look at the other one. It's in them all.And yet there is Someone, whose handsinfinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

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.

What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude.

Across the moment, aeons speak with aeons. More than we experienced has gone by.

But there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere.

Don't take my devils away, because my angels may flee too.

And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers-perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love; the more they give, the more they possess of that precious nourishing love from which flowers and children have their strength and which could help all human beings if they would take it without doubting.

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.

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.

Perhaps the great renewal of the world will consist of this, that man and woman, freed of all confused feelings and desires, shall no longer seek each other as opposites, but simply as members of a family and neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to simply, earnestly, patiently, and jointly bear the heavy responsibility of sexuality that has been entrusted to them.

If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees. Instead we entangle ourselves in knots of our own making and struggle, lonely and confused. So like children, we begin again... to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly. (from the poem "How Sure Gravity's Law")

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'hierarchies? and even if one of thempressed me against his heart: I would be consumedin that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothingbut the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,and we are so awed because it serenely disdainsto annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

Love the questions, themselves.

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.

And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things.

Comfort me from wherever you are–alone, we are quickly worn out; if I place my head on the road, let it seem softened by you. Could it be that even from afar we offer each other a gentle breath?

Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.

There may be good, but there are no pleasant marriages.

I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

Go on loving what is good, simple, and ordinary.

It was not in me It came and went I wanted to hold it It was held by wine (I no longer know what it was)

Religion is something infinitely simple, ingenuous. It is not knowledge, not content of feeling... it is not duty and not renunciation, it is not restriction: but in the infinite extent of the universe it is a direction of the heart.

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.

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.