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Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

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Famous Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”

ChangeDepressionMiseryHardship
Book:Letters to a Young Poet
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“Want the change. Be inspired by the flame where everything shines as it disappears. The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much as the curve of the body as it turns away. What locks itself in sameness has congealed. Is it safer to be gray and numb? What turns hard becomes rigid and is easily shattered. Pour yourself like a fountain. Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins. Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel, dares you to become the wind. - Sonnets To Orpheus, Part Two, XII”

ChangeMindfulnessTransformation
Book:Sonnets to Orpheus
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“In a case like this, the thing is (in my own opinion) to draw back upon oneself, and not to strive after any other being, not to relate the suffering, occasioned by both, to the cause of the suffering (which lies so far outside) but to make it fruitful for oneself. If you transfer what goes on in your emotion into solitude and do not bring your vacillating and tremulous feeling into the dangerous proximity of magnetic forces, it will, through its inherent flexibility, assume of its own accord the position that is natural and necessary to it. In any case, it helps to remind oneself very often that over everything that exists there are laws which never fail to operate, which come rushing, rather, to manifest and prove themselves upon every stone and upon every feather we let fall. So all erring consists simply in the failure to recognize the natural laws to which we are subject in the given instance, and every solution begins with our alertness and concentration, which gently draw us into the chain of events and restore to our will its balancing counterweights..." ―from letter to Emanuel von Bodman Westerwede bei Bremen (August 17, 1901)”

LoveSufferingRainer Maria Rilke
Book:Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910
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“There the tree rises. Oh pure surpassing! Oh Orpheus sings! Oh great tree of sound! And all is silent, And from this silence arise New beginnings, intimations, changings. From the stillness animals throng, out of the clear Snapping forest of lair and nest; And thus they are stealthy not from cunning Not from fear But to hear. And in their hearts the howling, the cry, The stag-call seem too little. And where before Was but the rudest shelter to receive these, A refuge fashioned out of darkest longing Entered, tremulo, the doorpost aquiver, - There You have fashioned them a temple for their hearing.”

LoveBeautyMusicOrpheus
Book:Sonnets to Orpheus
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“Oh my heart, sing of the gardens which you have never known! Those which are frozen in glass, clear, unreachable. Water and roses of Isfahan, or Shiraz, Give blessed song, give praise equal to none. Oh my heart, give evidence that they have not spared you, And that it is you who are intended, and it is for you that they ripen their figs. That it is you who ply between their blossoming boughs, Like a face, in the rousing winds. Avoid the mistake of imagining some deprivation, For the decision has been taken: to be! Silk thread, weave your way into the fabric! Whatever the image with which you have become one (even if it be but a moment from a life of pain), Feel that the whole carpet, so worthy of praise, is intended!”

BeautyPersiaDivine Existence
Book:Sonnets to Orpheus
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“He can remind himself that all beauty in plants and animals is a quiet and durable form of love and longing, and he can see the animal, as also the plant, patiently and willingly joining and multiplying and growing, not from physical pleasure, not from physical suffering, but bowing to necessities which are greater than pleasure and pain and more powerful than desire and resistance. Oh if only mankind could embrace this mystery, which penetrates the earth right into its smallest elements, with more humility, and bear and sustain it with more gravity and know how terribly heavy it is, instead of taking it lightly.”

LoveNatureBeauty
Book:Letters to a Young Poet
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“And your doubts can become a good quality if you school them. They must grow to be knowledgeable, they must learn to be critical. As soon as they begin to spoil something for you ask them why a thing is ugly, demand hard evidence, test them, and you will perhaps find them at a loss and short of an answer, or perhaps mutinous. But do not give in, request arguments, and act with this kind of attentiveness and consistency every single time, and the day will come when instead of being demolishers they will be among your best workers--perhaps the canniest of all those at work on the building of your life.”

LifeGrowthLearningDoubtSelf Doubt
Book:Letters to a Young Poet
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“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 hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.”

Love
Book:Letters to a Young Poet
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“I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough to make every moment holy. I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough just to lie before you like a thing, shrewd and secretive. I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will, as it goes toward action; and in those quiet, sometimes hardly moving times, when something is coming near, I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone. I want to be a mirror for your whole body, and I never want to be blind, or to be too old to hold up your heavy and swaying picture. I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie. and I want my grasp of things to be true before you. I want to describe myself like a painting that I looked at closely for a long time, like a saying that I finally understood, like the pitcher I use every day, like the face of my mother, like a ship that carried me through the wildest storm of all.”

PoetryGrowthSolitude
Book:Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
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“Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.”

IdeasFeelingsBirthIntuition
Book:Letters to a Young Poet
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“Just as the sheet nearest to hand takes from a master The true hasty stroke, just so The mirror often takes into itself The sole, the divine laugh of a girl, As she experiences the morning, alone - Or in the radiance of attendant candlelight. And later, when this visage actually breathes, Gives back only a reflection. What eyes have not upon occasion gazed Into the long-smoking embers that fade in the fire: Life-glimpses, lost forever?”

Growing UpGirlhoodGrowing PainsLosing Time
Book:Sonnets to Orpheus
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