Source: Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems
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Famous Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes
“I believe that nothing that is real can pass away.”
Source: Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910
“I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.”
Source: Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
Source: The Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus: A Dual Language Edition
Source: Letters to a Young Poet
“Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.”
Source: Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations
Source: Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910
Source: Letters
“Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”
Source: Letters to a Young Poet
“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”
Source: Selected poems
“Love is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack.”
Source: Letters on Cézanne
“Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.”
Source: Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations
“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
“Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.”
“No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.”
“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”
“The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.”
Source: Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910
“There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.”
Source: Prose and poetry
“All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.”
Source: Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910
“Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.”
Source: The Duino elegies
Source: The notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Source: Rodin and Other Prose Pieces
“One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.”
Source: Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations
Source: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
Source: Letters to a Young Poet
“I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.”
Source: Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
“Swells, Marina? we ocean, depths, Marina? we sky!”
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
Source: Fifty Selected Poems with English Translations