“When you go to bed, don't leave bread or milk
on the table: it attracts the dead.”
Rainer Maria Rilke book Sonnets to Orpheus
Sonnet 6 (as translated by Edward Snow)
Sonnets to Orpheus (1922)
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@xy, member from Sept. 25, 2023“I am the rest between two notes which are somehow always in discord.”
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer
“That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.”
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer
Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet
Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Context: People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; 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.
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Rainer Maria Rilke book Duino Elegies
First Elegy (as translated by Stephen Mitchell)
Source: Duino Elegies (1922)
Context: Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them
pressed me against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.
“Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other.”
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer
“And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been”
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer
Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet
Letter One (17 February 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Context: No one can advise or help you — no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.
“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
… live in the question.”
Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet
Source: Letters to a Young Poet
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer
from poem Go to the Limits of Your Longing.
Appears in movie Jojo Rabbit.
Variant: Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final