Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.

Look, we don't love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms.

We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most intimate.

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat held for it by a row of ancient trees; you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight, one journeying to heaven, one that falls; and leave you, not at home in either one, not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses, not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes a star each night, and rises; and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel) your life, with its immensity and fear, so that, now bounded, now immeasurable it is alternately stone in you and star.

Where I create, there I am true.

Your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance.

It wasn't his, it wasn't my fault, we both had nothing except patience, but Death has none. I saw him come (how meanly!) and I watched him as he took and took: none of it I could claim as mine.

Who speaks of conquering? To endure is everything.

Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything.

Whoever now makes himself bigger, freer and more human in his own existence, is doing his part toward peace, — as yet it must be worked at in an inward direction, not until a few have it all big and ready within them can it let itself be brought into the world.

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

It is part of the nature of every definitive love that sooner or later it can reach the beloved only in infinity.

What batters you becomes your strength.

We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard - of, must be possible in it. This is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most inexplicable.

You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. ... But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you [that is, passed through you]. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.

Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.

Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walk only on feelings. That faces upward and in its mirror receives heavenly roads, which travel along themselves. That has learned to walk upon water when it scoops, that walks upon wells, transfiguring every path. That steps into other hands, changes those that are like it into a landscape: wanders and arrives within them, fills them with arrival.

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.

the knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance.

Fame — the aggregate of all the misunderstandings that collect around a new name.

No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others

Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words.

What happens most deeply inside you is worthy of your whole love.

I live my life in widening circle That reach out across the world. I may not ever complete the last one, But I give myself to it. I circle around God, that primordial tower. I have been circling for thousands of years, And I still don't know: am I a falcon, A storm, or a great song? [I, 2]

Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And not our acceptance of it is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments.

You, God, who live next door - If at times, through the long night, I trouble you with my urgent knocking - this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom. I know you're all alone in that room. If you should be thirsty, there's no one to get you a glass of water. I wait listening, always. Just give me a sign! I'm right here... Sen komşu tanrı, Uzun geceler bazen, Kapına vura vura uyandırıyorsam seni Solumanı seyrek duyduğumdandır... Bilirim, yalnızsın odanda. Sana birşey gerekse kimse yok, Bir yudum su versin aradığında. Hep dinlerim, yeter ki bir ses edin, Öyle yakınım sana.

And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been

Earth, is not this what you will: in us to rise up invisible? Is it, O Earth, not your dream once to be wholly invisible? Earth! Invisible! What, if not change, is your desperate mission?

The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.

God... sat down for a moment when the dog was finished in order to watch it... and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it could not have been made better.

All feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts you. Everything you can think of as you face your childhood, is good. Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn't intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom.

If the Angel deigns to appear, it will be because you have convinced him, not by tears but by your humble resolve to be always beginning — to be a Beginner!

Do not allow yourself to be misled by the surfaces of things

At the bottom no one in life can help anyone else in life; this one experiences over and over in every conflict and every perplexity: that one is alone. That isn't as bad as it may first appear; and again it is the best thing in life that each should have everything in himself; his fate, his future, his whole expanse and world.

I want to love the things as no one has thought to love them.

Deeply I go down into myself. My god is Dark and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.

If your everyday life appears to be unworthy subject matter, do not complain to life. Complain to yourself, Lament that you are not poet enough to call up its wealth.

Live the questions now.

Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.

Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.

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.

Strangely, I heard a stranger say, I am with you.

Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakable tender hand, placed beside another thread and held and carried by a hundred others.

There exists a creature which is perfectly harmless; when it passes before your eyes you scarcely notice it and forget it again immediately. But as soon as it invisibly gets somehow into your ears, it develops there, it hatches, as it were, and cases have been known where it was penetrated even into the brain and has thriven devastatingly in that organ, like those pneumococci in dogs that gain entrance through the nose.This creature is one's neighbor.

There are quite a number of people in the reading-room; but one is not aware of them. They are inside the books. They move, sometimes, within the pages like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

What else can I tell you? It seems to me that everything has its proper emphasis; and finally I want to add just one more bit of advice: to keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your whole development; you couldn't disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to questions that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer.

A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development.

Love the questions themselves...Live the questions now and have confidence that someday far into the future, [I will live my] way into the answer.