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Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

Poet

German poet known for his profound poetry and epistolary works. Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry style is unique, often exploring themes such as loneliness, love, and religious faith.

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All Ifs Solitude Love Life World Poetry Knows Way People Heart

Famous Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

“That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.”

World May Done Whole Spirit Vision Mankind Strange Bottom Harm Senses Endless Encounters Crowded Have Courage Cowardly Inexplicable Spirit World

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.”

Ifs Way Art Creative Judging Art Is Works Of Art

Book:Letters to a Young Poet

Source: Letters to a Young Poet

“No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others”

Has Beens Hands Fate Wonderful Events Hundred Wide Thread Smallest Fabric Unimportant

Book:Letters to a Young Poet

Source: Letters to a Young Poet

“you are not too old and it is not too late to dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out it's own secret”

Life Inspirational Giving Secret Late Depth Too Late Hoe

Book:Selected poems

Source: Selected poems

“with poems one accomplishes so little when one writes them early. One should hold off and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, right at the end, one could perhaps write ten lines that are good.”

Ifs Should Writing Littles Long Ends Whole Lines Ten Accomplish Whole Life Sweetness Long Life

Book:The notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Source: The notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

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

Spirituality Healing Journey Military

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case.”

Believe May Said Enough Happens Life Is Wish Difficult Cases Solitude Endure Simplicity Acquire Believe In Me Life Happens

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“I am the rest between two notes which are somehow always in discord.”

Two Notes Discord

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.”

Humans Wells Two Human Beings Opposing

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words.”

May Has Beens Sometimes Able Friendship Simple Sadness Comfort Quiet Difficulty Remains Assuming Simplicity Assumption Emo

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.”

Whole Feelings Growth Hours Answers Growing Development Expecting

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude”

Source: Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations

“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.”

World Way Needs Strange Calling Fleeting Fleeting World

Book:The Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus: A Dual Language Edition

Source: The Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus: A Dual Language Edition

“Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.”

Terror Bearable

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“Shattered people are best represented by bits and pieces.”

People Bits Pieces Shattered Bits And Pieces

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.”

Long Lasts Talking Silent Manifest Calculations

Book:The Book of Images

Source: The Book of Images

“Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”

Love Believe Faith Wish Steps Strength Blessing Have Faith Inheritance

Book:Letters to a Young Poet

Source: Letters to a Young Poet

“Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.”

Way Want Giving Should Mean Children Understanding Wise Giving Up Participation Scorn Defensiveness

Book:Letters to a Young Poet

Source: Letters to a Young Poet

“a kind of memory that tells us that what we're now striving for was once nearer and truer and attached to us with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, there it was breath. After the first home the second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.”

Firsts Kind Home Seems Memories Infinite Breaths Distance Strive Tenderness First Home

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“Here is the time for the sayable, here is its home. Speak and attest. More than ever the things we can live with are falling away, and ousting them, filling their place, a will with no image. Will beneath crusts which readily crack whenever the act inside swells and seeks new borders.”

Home Fall Speak Borders Cracks Filling

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.”

Knows Want Looks Heart May Alive Praise Invisible Rescue Departure Transient

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

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

Wells Looks Heart Existence Childhood My Heart Living On

Book:Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters

Source: Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters

“How I will cherish you then, you grief-torn nights! Had I only received you, inconsolable sisters, on more abject knees, only buried myself with more abandon in your loosened hair. How we waste our afflictions! We study them, stare out beyond them into bleak continuance, hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas they're really our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one of the seasons of the clandestine year -- ; not only a season --: they're site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.”

Source: Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters

“But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem: they might point to the catkins hanging from the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the rain descending on black earth in early spring. --- And we, who always think of happiness rising, would feel the emotion that almost baffles us when a happy thing falls.”

Thinking Feels Might Earth Fall Black Emotion Tree Spring Rain Direct Empty Rising Descending Emblems Happy Things Early Spring

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“Isn't it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.”

Way Grew Sorrow Ancient Strings Loved Ones Survived Arrows Abiding Vectors

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breathe ourselves out and away; with each new heartfire we give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us: you're in my blood, this room, Spring itself is filled with you . . . To what end? He can't hold us, we vanish within him and around him.”

Giving Feels May Ends Rooms Blood Spring Filled Breathe Scent

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.”

Looks House Secret Half Air Tree Quiet Shame

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“Why don't you think of [God] as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity... the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are.”

Thinking Has Beens God Hope Tree Ultimate Eternity Fruit

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.”

Want Should Facts Moving Solitude Confused

Book:Letters to a Young Poet

Source: Letters to a Young Poet

“It is clear that we must trust what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.”

Knows Way Trying Littles Reason Grows Difficult Clear Alive Cost Solitude Certainty Opposition Abandon Solitary

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.”

Order Dies Lost Break Sadness Dangerous Disease Treated Noise Rejected Unhealthy Intervals Break Out

Book:Letters to a Young Poet

Source: Letters to a Young Poet

“only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.”

Persons Sound Alive Relationship Ready Depth Openness

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.”

People Knows Rooms Walking Window Corners Spots Back And Forth

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“She who reconciles the ill-matched threads Of her life, and weaves them gratefully Into a single cloth – It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall And clears it for a different celebration.”

Different Ill Halls Celebration Thread Reconcile Matched

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

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

“Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.”

Looks Happens Past Easy Change Share Draws Blame Conclusion Your Past

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.”

Needs Believe Earth Winning Believe In Me Springtime

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world. As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed. Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly. An image enters in, rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone.”

Source: The best of Rilke: 72 form-true verse translations with facing originals, commentary, and compact biography ; translated by Walter Arndt ; foreword by Cyrus Hamlin

“FALLING STARS: Do you remember still the falling stars that like swift horses through the heavens raced and suddenly leaped across the hurdles of our wishes -- do you recall? And we did make so many! For there were countless numbers of stars: each time we looked above we were astounded by the swiftness of their daring play, while in our hearts we felt safe and secure watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate, knowing somehow we had survived their fall.”