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Rilke Quotes

Browse 29 quotes about Rilke.

Rilke Quotes

“Progress And again my inmost life rushes louder, as if it moved now between steeper banks. Objects become ever more related to me, and all pictures ever more perused. I feel myself more trusting in the nameless: with my senses, as with birds, I reach into the windy heavens from the oak, and into the small ponds' broken-off day my feeling sinks, as if it stood on fishes. (Fortschritt Und wieder rauscht mein tiefes Leben lauter, als ob es jetzt in breitern Ufern ginge. Immer verwandter werden mir die Dinge und alle Bilder immer angeschauter. Dem Namenlosen fühl ich mich vertrauter: Mit meinen Sinnen, wie mit Vögeln, reiche ich in die windigen Himmel aus der Eiche, und in den abgebrochnen Tag der Teiche sinkt, wie auf Fischen stehend, mein Gefühl.)”

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Book:The Book of Images
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“Out of infinite desires rise finite deeds like weak fountains that fall back in early trembling arcs. But those, which otherwise in us keep hidden, our happy strengths — they come forth in these dancing tears. (Aus unendlichen Sehnsüchten steigen endliche Taten wie schwache Fontänen, die sich zeitig und zitternd neigen. Aber, die sich uns sonst verschweigen, unsere fröhlichen kräfte — zeigen sich in diesen tanzenden Tränen.)”

ActionDesirePoetryDreamsRegretLongingRilkeInteriority
Book:The Book of Images
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“But we, when moved by deep feeling, evaporate; we breathe ourselves out and away; from moment to moment our emotion grows fainter, like a perfume. Though someone may tell us: “Yes, you’ve entered my bloodstream, the room, the whole springtime is filled with you . . . " — what does it matter? they can’t contain us, we vanish inside them and around them. (Denn wir, wo wir fühlen, verflüchtigen; ach wir atmen uns aus und dahin; von Holzglut zu Holzglut geben wir schwachern Geruch. Da sagt uns wohl einer: ja, du gehst mir ins Blut, dieses Zimmer, der Frühling füllt sich mit dir . . . Was hilfts, er kann uns nicht halten, wir schwinden inihm und um ihn.)”

LovePoetryTimePassionEmotionEmptinessContentmentFeelingTransienceRilke
Author:Rainer Maria Rilke
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“Most days I live awed by the world we have still, rather than mourning the worlds we have lost. The bandit mask of a cedar waxwing on a bare branch a few feet away; the clear bright sun of a frozen winter noon; the rise of Orion in the eastern evening sky-every day, every night, I give thanks for another chance to notice. I see beauty everywhere; so much beauty I often speak it aloud. So much beauty I often laugh, and my day is made. Still if you wanted to, I think, you could feel sadness without end. I’m not even talking about hungry children or domestic violence or endless wars between supposedly grown men…but ‘you mustn’t be frightened if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you even seen,' said Rilke, 'you must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in it hand and will not let you fall.”

LoveHopeStarsWonderBeautySadnessGratitudeAweNight SkyGrateful HeartStargazingRilke
Book:The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light
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“It is clear enough that not every something can be elevated to the rank of a thing - otherwise everything and everyone would be speaking once more, and the chatter would spread from humans to things. Rilke privileges two categories of 'entities' [Seienden), to express it in the papery diction of philosophy, that are eligible for the lofty task of acting as message-things - artifices and living creatures - with the latter gaining their particular quality from the former, as if animals were being's highest works of art before humans. Inherent to both is a message energy that does not activate itself, but requires the poet as a decoder and messenger.”

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Author:Peter Sloterdijk
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“Their train speeds through the cities and crosses rivers until it reaches Paris. They leave the station, their arms around each other, and walk to the Jardin des Plantes where the panther paces the length of his cage. The young teacher nods as Hannelore Beier reaches into the cage, and strokes the animal's magnificent neck. The panther arches his back. A curtain lifts from his pupils as the pastor's sister slides aside the bolt that has kept him in captivity. His eyes like sudden, green flames, he recognizes a world beyond the bars of his cage.”

FreedomRilkePantherJardin Des Plantes
Book:Floating in My Mother's Palm
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“Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive. (Sei allem Abschied voran, als wäre er hinter dir, wie der Winter, der eben geht. Denn unter Wintern ist einer so endlos Winter, daß, überwinternd, dein Herz überhaupt übersteht.)”

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Author:Rainer Maria Rilke
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“Nessuno ha idea di cosa significhino quelle parole, e se fin da quando Gioia tre mesi fa è arrivata in questa scuola è stata subito additata come Quella-non-del-tutto-a-posto o Quella-con-un-sacco-di-problemi, è anche per quelle quattro parole che si riscrive, ogni mattina, sul braccio. «Ma che roba è? Inglese o cosa?» le aveva chiesto il terzo giorno Giulia Batta, la compagna che nella classifica delle più belle della classe figurava esattamente al primo posto. «O cosa», aveva risposto Gioia, senza neanche guardarla. Avrebbe voluto spiegarle che era in tedesco, quella scritta, e che erano parole quasi intraducibili ma significavano più o meno: “Quando la felicità è qualcosa che cade”, e forse anche dirle perché si scriveva addosso proprio quelle parole, ogni giorno: ma il modo in cui glielo aveva chiesto, gli sguardi di tutti lì intorno, be’, insomma, alla fine tutto quello che aveva risposto era stato: «O cosa». Che per inciso, per settimane intere, erano state anche le uniche parole che aveva scambiato coi suoi nuovi compagni. Il fatto è che certe cose le puoi dire solo a chi sai che le può capire. Che è anche il motivo per cui parliamo così poco, di quello che ci importa davvero.”

AmoreAmiciziaRilkeScuolaBullismoEppure Cadiamo Felici
Book:Eppure cadiamo felici
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“Reading Rilke's quote above, it is clear his work will forever touch the delicate nerves of my sensitivity, unbinding them from places in which they have been hiding. I don't need to know all the answers anymore. My understanding of things unknown is inherent to who I am and allows me to walk up the stairway of life unencumbered by walls of uncertainty. While this esoteric sensibility does not provide instructions for the day to day operations of living, it allows a comfortable understanding that “home” will be attainable in due time. Remaining patient during this process is my life lesson and one I have been asked to embrace fully. It is up to me to let go and allow.”

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Author:Lavinia Busch
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“What appears in the former statue of Apollo, however, cannot simply be equated with the Olympian of the same name, who had to ensure light, contours, foreknowledge and security of form in his days of completeness. Rather, as the poem's title implies, he stands for something much older, something rising from prehistoric sources. He symbolizes a divine magma in which something of the first ordering force, as old as the world itself, becomes manifest. There is no doubt that memories of Rodin and his cyclopian work ethic had an effect on Rilke here. During his work with the great artist, he experienced what it means to work on the surfaces of bodies until they are nothing but a fabric of carefully shaped, luminous, almost seeing 'places'. A few years earlier, he had written of Rodin's sculptures that 'there were endless places, and none of them did not have something happening in them'. Each place is a point at which Apollo, the god of forms and surfaces, makes a visually intense and haptically palpable compromise with his older opponent Dionysus, the god of urges and currents. That this energized Apollo embodies a manifestation of Dionysus is indicated by the statement that the stone glistens 'like wild beasts' fur'.”

PoetrySculptureApolloDionysusRilkeRodinThing Poem
Book:Du mußt dein Leben ändern
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“As we know, Rilke, under the influence of Auguste Rodin, whom he had assisted between 1905 and 1906 in Meudon as a private secretary, turned away from the art nouveau-like, sensitized-atmospheric poetic approach of his early years to pursue a view of art determined more strongly by the priority of the object. The proto-modern pathos of making way for the object without depicting it in a manner 'true to nature', like that of the old masters, led in Rilke's case to the concept of the thing-poem - and thus to a temporarily convincing new answer to the question of the source of aesthetic and ethical authority. From that point, it would be the things themselves from which all authority would come - or rather: from this respectively current singular thing that turns to me by demanding my full gaze. This is only possible because thing-being would now no longer mean anything but this: having something to say.”

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Book:Du mußt dein Leben ändern
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“We know from accounts of Rilke's life that his stay in Rodin's workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. The poet's view of the mutilated body thus has nothing to do with the previous century's Romanticism of fragments and ruins; it is part of the breakthrough in modern art to the concept of the object that states itself with authority and the body that publicizes itself with authorization.”

AuthorityRuinsSculptureRomanticismRilkeRodinThing Poem
Book:Du mußt dein Leben ändern
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“This gesture is one of the motifs of modernity's turn against the principle of imitating nature, that is to say, imitating predefined morphological expectations. It is still capable of perceiving message-totalities and autonomous thing-signals when no morphologically intact figures are left - indeed, precisely then. The sense for perfection withdraws from the forms of nature - probably because nature itself is in the process of losing its ontological authority. The popularization of photography also increasingly devalues the standard views of things. As the first edition of the visible, nature comes into discredit. It can no longer assert its authority as the sender of binding messages - for reasons that ultimately come from its disenchantment through being scientifically explored and technically outdone. After this shift, 'being perfect' takes on an altered meaning: it means having something to say that is more meaningful than the chatter of conventional totalities. Now the torsos and their ilk have their turn: the hour of those forms that do not remind us of anything has come. Fragments, cripples and hybrids formulate something that cannot be conveyed by the common whole forms and happy integrities; intensity beats standard perfection.”

SciencePoetryNaturePerfectAuthorityPhotographyPerfectionTechniqueIntensityFragmentsModernityCripplesRilkeThing PoemHybrids
Book:Du mußt dein Leben ändern
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“What the poet has to say to the torso of the supposed Apollo, however, is more than a note on an excursion to the antiquities collection. The author's point is not that the thing depicts an extinct god who might be of interest to the humanistically educated, but that the god in the stone constitutes a thing-construct that is still on air. We are dealing with a document of how newer message ontology outgrew traditional theologies. Here, being itself is understood as having more power to speak and transmit, and more potent authority, than God, the ruling idol of religions. In modern times, even a God can find himself among the pretty figures that no longer mean anything to us - assuming they do not become openly irksome. The thing filled with being, however, does not cease to speak to us when its moment has come.”

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Book:Du mußt dein Leben ändern
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“The reason for the existence of the perfection conjured up in these fourteen lines is that it possesses ... the authorization to form a message that appeals from within itself. This power of appeal is exquisitely evident in the object evoked here. The perfect thing is that which articulates an entire principle of being. The poem has to perform no more and no less than to perceive the principle of being in the thing and adapt it to its own existence - with the aim of becoming a construct with an equal power to convey a message.”

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Book:Du mußt dein Leben ändern
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“In his field, and with his means, Rilke carries out an operation that one could philosophically describe as the 'transformation of being into message' (more commonly, 'linguistic turn'). 'Being that can be be understood is language', Heidegger would later state - which conversely implies that language abandoned by being becomes mere chatter.”

LanguageBeingChatterHeideggerRilkeThing PoemLinguistic Turn
Book:Du mußt dein Leben ändern
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“I receive the reward for my willingness to participate in the object-subject reversal in the form of a private illumination - in the present case, as an aesthetic movedness. The torso, which has no place that does not see me, likewise does not impose itself - it exposes itself. It exposes itself by testing whether I will recognize it as a seer. Acknowledging it as a seer essentially means 'believing' in it, where believing, as noted above, refers to the inner operations that are necessary to conceive of the vital principle in the stone as a sender of discrete addressed energies. If I somehow succeed in this, I am also able to take the glow of subjectivity away from the stone. I tentatively accept the way it stands there in exemplary radiance, and receive the starlike eruption of its surplus of authority and soul.”

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Book:Du mußt dein Leben ändern
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