xy

@xy, member from Sept. 25, 2023

Favourite quotes (21448)

“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.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Source: Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke (1960)
Rilke's Letters
Context: What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.

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

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

“Look: the trees exist; the houses
we dwell in stand there stalwartly.
Only we
pass by it all, like a rush of air.
And everything conspires to keep quiet
about us,
half out of shame perhaps, half out of
some secret hope.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Duino Elegies

Source: Duino Elegies

“Earth, my dearest, oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over… Unspeakably, I have belonged to you, from the flush.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

“As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

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

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

“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.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

“All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Wartime Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 1914-1921 (1940), translated by M.D. Herter Norton

“She followed slowly, taking a long time,
As though there were some obstacles in the way;
And yet: as though, once it was overcome,
She would be beyond all walking, and would fly.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

“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.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

“Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, seperate, in the evening.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

“And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Four (16 July 1903)
Variant: 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. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. (Translation by Stephen Mitchell)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Context: Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

“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?”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

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

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

“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.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Source: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
Of her life, and weaves them gratefully
Into a single cloth –
It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
And clears it for a different celebration.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

“Shattered people are best represented by bits and pieces.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

“And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Source: Letters to a Young Poet