xy

“In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

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

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

“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.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

“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.”

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

“You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the the hour of the new clarity.”

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

“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.”

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

“Everything terrible is something that needs our love.”

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

“How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?”

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

“If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

“Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.”

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

“Every angel is terrifying.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Duino Elegies

“I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.”

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

“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.”

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

“But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

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

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

“you are not too old
and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out
it's own secret”

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

“Think… of the world you carry within you.”

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

“Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.”

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

“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.”

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