Quotes by
Rainer Maria Rilke |
1875-1926 , Czech-German poet
He became internationally famous with such works as Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. He is recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets. His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry and several volumes of correspondence.
His most read book is the Letters to a Young Poet. It is his correspondence with a young man who wanted to be a poet and had written to him.
| 52 quotes | 4,168 visits |
Quotations
| • | The only journey is the one within. 12 |
| • | I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone. 8 |
| • | What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours –that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child. 6 |
| • | We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it. 6 |
| • | Who is talking about winning? What matters is to endure. 6 |
| • | Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. 5 |
| • | That something is difficult must be one more reason for us to undertake it. 5 |
| • | We contain our death like the fruit its stone. 5 |
| • | Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance. 3 |
| • | You who never arrived in my arms, Beloved, who were lost from the start, I don't even know what songs would please you. |
| • | The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you. |
| • | He was a poet and hated the approximate. |
| • | Death is the side of life which is turned away from us. |
| • | Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything. |
| • | 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. |
| • | A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity. |
| • | If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place. |
| • | Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. |
| • | Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. |
| • | Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows. |
| • | The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude. |
| • | If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees. |
| • | Do not allow yourself to be misled by the surfaces of things. |
| • | Don’t take my demons away, because my angels may flee too. |
| • | 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. |
| • | I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or an unfinished song. |
| • | The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things. |
| • | This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly. |
| • | To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass; to love is to last. |
| • | As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still, it is we who move in infinite space. |
| • | And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it. |
| • | Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems. |
| • | Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive. |
| • | The only sorrows that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them in the noise. |
| • | As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things, and build. |
| • | So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp. |
| • | When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused. |
| • | Since I’ve learned to be silent, everything has come so much closer to me. |
| • | Our deepest fears are like dragons, guarding our deepest treasure. |
| • | You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. |
| • | Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you’ve learned, but in the questions you’ve learned how to ask yourself. |
| • | Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading. |
| • | Love is the unique opportunity to mature, to take shape, to become a world for the love of the loved one. |
| • | We are the bees of the Universe. We frantically plunder the honey of the visible to accumulate it in the great golden hive of the invisible. |
| • | What would a God be without the cloud that protects and covers him? |
| • | Because deep down, and precisely for the deepest and most important things, we are unquestionably alone. |
| • | And if what is near to you is far away, then your immense space is already touching the stars. |
| • | For now, live with the questions. Perhaps, a distant day, you will enter like this, little by little, without noticing it, inside the answer. |
Quotes in Verse
| • | Let everything happen to you Beauty and terror Just keep going No feeling is final. 4 |
| • | I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough to make every hour holy. |
| • | When you go to bed, don't leave bread or milk on the table: it attracts the dead. |
| • | Let everything happen to you Beauty and terror Just keep going No feeling is final. |