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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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Famous Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

“That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.”

People Heart Whole Young Force Capable Anxious Solitary Beginners

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps: silence of paintings. You language where all language ends. You time standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.”

Heart Ends Language Silence Painting Standing Mortals Breathing Statues

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke

“Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.”

Source: Letters

“Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.”

Heart Fall Falling In Love Lifts Sat Curtains Falling Apart Scenery

Book:The Duino elegies

Source: The Duino elegies

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

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

“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”

Ifs Writing Heart Reason Dies Roots Depth Spread Command Forbidden Chakra

Book:Letters to a Young Poet

Source: Letters to a Young Poet

“O how all things are far removed and long have passed away. I do believe the star, whose light my face reflects, is dead and has been so for many thousand years. I had a vision of a passing boat and heard some voices saying disquieting things. I heard a clock strike in some distant house... but in which house?... I long to quiet my anxious heart and stand beneath the sky's immensity. I long to pray... And one of all the stars must still exist. I do believe that I would know which one alone endured, and which like a white city stands at the ray's end shining in the heavens.”

“No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write, find out wether it spreading out its root in the deepest places of your heart...Delve into yourself for a deep answer”

Should Writing Heart Reason Helping Answers One Thing Roots Advise

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

“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.”