Rainer Maria Rilke: Trending quotes

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Rainer Maria Rilke: 352 quotes229 likes

“We make our way through Everything like thread passing through fabric, giving shape to images that we ourselves do not know.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

“I am a house gutted by fire where only the guilty sometimes sleep before the punishment that devours them hounds them out in the open.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

Source: Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“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.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

“Who speaks of victory? To endure is all.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

“Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner -- what is it?
if not the intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

Source: Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose

“Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Ten (26 December 1908)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again. But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the earth, seems irrevocable.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

“weren’t you always
distracted by expectation, as if every event
announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place
to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)…”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Duino Elegies

First Elegy (as translated by Stephen Mitchell)
Source: Duino Elegies (1922)
Context: Yes—the springtimes needed you. Often a star
was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you
out of the distant past, or as you walked
under an open window, a violin
yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.
But could you accomplish it? Weren't you always
distracted by expectation, as if every event
announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place
to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)

“Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

“All things want to float.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

“Life is heavier than the weight of all things.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

“So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

Source: Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Variant: Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
Source: Letters to a Young Poet

“There are a large number of people in the room, but one is unaware of them. They are in the books. At times they move among the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Source: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

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

Rainer Maria Rilke book Duino Elegies

Source: Duino Elegies

“It’s possible, I’m moving through the hard veins of heavy mountains, like an arc, alone; I’m so deep inside, I see no end in sight, and no distance: everything is getting near and everything near is turning to stone.”

Rainer Maria Rilke