Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury, are beginning to grow lazy and indifferent; the desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare. In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one's own.

Be-and yet know the great void where all things begin, the infinite source of your own most intense vibration, so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.

The most visible joy can only reveal itself to us when we've transformed it, within.

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.

To be here is immense.

The point is to live everything.

Wishes are recollections coming from the future.

Now for some heartwork.

Speaking of August Rodin: He raised his world above us in an immense arc, and made it a part of nature.

His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world. As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed. Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly. An image enters in, rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone.

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.

Everything is gestation and then birthing.

the longer I live, the more necessary it seems to me to endure, to copy the whole dictation of existence to the end, for it might be that only the last sentence contains that small, perhaps inconspicuous word through which all laboriously learned and not understood orients itself toward glorious sense.

Be, in this immensity of night, the magic force at your sense's crossroad.

If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.

I would like to sing someone to sleep, to sit beside someone and be there. I would like to rock you and sing softly and go with you to and from sleep. I would like to be the one in the house who knew: The night was cold. And I would like to listen in and listen out into you, into the world, into the woods. The clocks shout to one another striking, and one sees to the bottom of time. And down below one last, strange man walks by and rouses a strange dog. And after that comes silence. I have laid my eyes upon you wide; and they hold you gently and let you go when something stirs in the dark.

Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and great each other.

Lord, it is time. The summer was very big. Lay thy shadow on the sundials, and on the meadows let the winds go loose. Command the last fruits that they shall be full; give them another two more southerly days, press them on to fulfillment and drive the last sweetiness into the heavenly wine.

Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.

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.

Our task is to listen to the news that is always arriving out of silence.

Our heart always transcends us.

Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

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.

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.

Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly they are passed on unopened.

Truly to sing, that is a different breath.

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

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Do not despair if the answers don't come immediately. Some answers are only revealed with the passage of time.

At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.

That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.

Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine. In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there. And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am.

I know of no other advice than this: Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth.

It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical will live the relation to another as something alive.

The only journey is the one within.

If there is nothing you can share with other people, try to be close to Things, they will not abandon you; and the nights are still here and the winds that move through the trees and across many lands; everything in the world of Things and animals is still filled with happening, which you can take part in.

A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.

Trees do not force their sap, nor does the flower push its bloom.

You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world, for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone, and then no one outside learns of you. But the darkness pulls in everything: shapes and fires, animals and myself, how easily it gathers them! - powers and people - and it is possible a great energy is moving near me. I have faith in nights.

We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.

I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.

and I circle ten thousand years long; And I still don't know if I'm a falcon, a storm, or an unfinished song

To be an artist means not to compute or count.

It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.

I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

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.

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