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

Source: Duino Elegies

Last update Sept. 29, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future lessens…. Superabundant existence wells in my heart." by Rainer Maria Rilke?
Rainer Maria Rilke photo
Rainer Maria Rilke 176
Austrian poet and writer 1875–1926

Related quotes

T.S. Eliot photo

“I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”

Source: The Waste Land (1922), Line 39 et seq.

Lucian photo
George F. Kennan photo

“I lived, particularly in childhood but with lessening intensity right on to middle age, in a world that was peculiarly and intimately my own, scarcely to be shared with others or even made plausible to them.”

George F. Kennan (1904–2005) American advisor, diplomat, political scientist and historian

A passage from the first volume of his Memoirs as quoted in Political Realism in American Thought (1977) by John W. Coffey, p. 26
Context: I lived, particularly in childhood but with lessening intensity right on to middle age, in a world that was peculiarly and intimately my own, scarcely to be shared with others or even made plausible to them. I habitually read special meanings into things, scenes and places — qualities of wonder, beauty, promise, or horror — for which there was no external evidence visible or plausible to others. My world was peopled with mysteries, seductive hints, vague menaces, "intimations of immortality."

James Anthony Froude photo

“The first state of mankind is the unreflecting state. The nature is undeveloped, looking neither before nor after; it acts on the impulse of the moment, and is troubled with no weary retrospect, nor with any notions of a remote future which present conduct can affect; and knowing neither good nor evil, better or worse, it does simply what it desires, and is happy in it. It is the state analogous to the early childhood of each of us, and is represented in the common theory of Paradise — the state of innocence.”

Fragments of Markham's notes
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: Our instinct has outrun our theory in this matter; for while we still insist upon free will and sin, we make allowance for individuals who have gone wrong, on the very ground of provocation, of temptation, of bad education, of infirm character. By and by philosophy will follow, and so at last we may hope for a true theory of morals. It is curious to watch, in the history of religious beliefs, the gradual elimination of this monster of moral evil. The first state of mankind is the unreflecting state. The nature is undeveloped, looking neither before nor after; it acts on the impulse of the moment, and is troubled with no weary retrospect, nor with any notions of a remote future which present conduct can affect; and knowing neither good nor evil, better or worse, it does simply what it desires, and is happy in it. It is the state analogous to the early childhood of each of us, and is represented in the common theory of Paradise — the state of innocence.

Michelangelo Antonioni photo
Fyodor Dostoyevsky photo
Anne Morrow Lindbergh photo
Marcus Aurelius photo
Ramana Maharshi photo

Related topics