Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

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175 Quotes on Wisdom, Beauty, and Life's Journey

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Be of good courage all is before you, and time passed in the difficult is never lost… What is required of us is that we live the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.”

“But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.”

“Never forget that solitude is my lot… I implore those who love me to love my solitude."

(, May 11, 1910)”

“It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning.”

“Whoever you are, go out into the evening,
leaving your room, of which you know every bit;
your house is the last before the infinite,
whoever you are.”

“A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity.”

“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.”

“Girls, there are poets who learn from you
to say, what you, in your aloneness, are;
and they learn through you to live distantness,
as the evenings through the great stars
become accustomed to eternity.”

“The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude.”

“You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world.”

“I live my life in growing orbits which move out over this wondrous world, I am circling around God, around ancient towers and i have been circling for a thousand years. And I still dont know if I am an eagle or a storm or a great song.”

“I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.”

“Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakable tender hand, placed beside another thread and held and carried by a hundred others.”

“Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

“The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.”

“Rose, oh pure contradiction, desire,
To be no one's sleep under so many
Lids.”

“There is only one journey. Going inside yourself.”

“Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.”

“Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.”

“Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded.”

“You, darkness, of whom I am born- I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes the rest.”

“Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing.”

“That is the principal thing-not to remain with the dream, with the intention, with the being-in-the-mood, but always forcibly to convert it all into things.”

“I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“All things want to float.”

“Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.”

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

“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.)…”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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