Rainer Maria Rilke: Trending quotes (page 4)

“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.”

“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.”

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

“You are nearing the land that is life; you will recognize it by its seriousness.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.)…”

“We are not allowed to linger, even with what is most intimate.”

“Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.”

“All things want to float.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing… then you are a writer.”