Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

Isn't it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.

I think of you often, dear, and with such concentrated wishes that it really must help you in some way.

Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstanding that can gather around a new name.

Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.

Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.

All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.

sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East. And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead. And another man, who remains inside his own house, stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses, so that his children have to go far out into the world toward that same church, which he forgot.

Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along.

In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.

Some day when I lose you, will you still be able to sleep, without me to whisper over you like a crown of linden branches?

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.

It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

Your life will still find its own paths from there, and that they may be good, rich, and wide is what I wish for you, more than I can say.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future lessens . . . . Superabundant existence wells in my heart.

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

As the arrow endures the string, and in the gathering momentum becomes more than itself. Because to stay is to be nowhere.

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.

Why don't you think of [God] as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity... the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are.

Somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work. Help me in saying it, to understand it.

a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude

My life is not this steeply sloping hour, in which you see me hurrying. Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree; I am only one of my many mouths, and at that, the one that will be still the soonest. I am the rest between two notes, which are somehow always in discord because Death’s note wants to climb over— but in the dark interval, reconciled, they stay there trembling. And the song goes on, beautiful.

Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

The deep parts of my life pour onward, as if the river shores were opening out. I feel closer to what language can't reach. With my senses, as with birds, I climb into the windy heaven... in the ponds broken off from the sky. . .

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.

And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves - not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

Let your beauty manifest itself without talking and calculation.​ You are silent. It says for you: I am. And comes in meaning thousandfold​, comes at long last over everyone.

For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences.

Love is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack.

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.

Huge lemons, cut in slices, would sink like setting suns into the dusky sea, softly illuminating it with their radiating membranes, and its clear, smooth surface aquiver from the rising bitter essence.

Whoever you are: in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything; yours is the last house before the far-off: whoever you are. With your eyes, which in their weariness barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold, you lift very slowly one black tree and place it against the sky: slender, alone. And you have made the world. And it is huge and like a word which grows ripe in silence. And as your will seizes on its meaning, tenderly your eyes let it go.

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.

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough

This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.

Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive.

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.

Believe 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.

I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.

Everything in the world of things and animals is still filled with happening, which you can take part in.

He does not always remain bent over the pages; he often leans back and closes his eyes over a line he has been reading again, and its meaning spreads through his blood.

There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.

God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don't let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.

Nearly everything that matters is a challenge, and everything matters.

So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.

You must think that something is happening upon you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.