Rainer Maria Rilke quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke on Wise Famous Quotes.

Wishes are recollections coming from the future.

I have patience for centuries in me and will live as though my time were very big.

You needed your whole self; and so you went and broke yourself, out of its grip, in pieces,painfully, because your need was great.

When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.

Go on loving what is good, simple, and ordinary.

It is part of the nature of every definitive love that sooner or later it can reach the beloved only in infinity.

I think of you often, dear, and with such concentrated wishes that it really must help you in some way.

We are unutterably alone essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important.

The future stands firm ... but we move in infinite space.

If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow

Art is childhood.

Nearly everything that matters is a challenge, and everything matters.

Draw near to Nature. Then try like some first human being to say what you see and experience and love and lose.

Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by greater and greater beings.

When you go to bed, don't leave bread or milk
on the table: it attracts the dead.
[sonnet 6]

What batters you becomes your strength.

Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive.

The grief, too, passes.

Strange / to wish wishes no longer. / Strange / to see things / that seemed to / belong together / floating in every / direction.

It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.

Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you.

For we, when we feel, evaporate: oh, we
breathe ourselves out and away: from ember to ember,
yielding us fainter fragrance.

Think: the hero prolongs himself, even his falling
was only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth.

I am a house gutted by fire where only the guilty sometimes sleep before the punishment that devours them hounds them out in the open.

What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude.

Who speaks of victory? To endure is all.

But there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere.

Then draw near to nature. Pretend you are the very first man and then write what you see and experience, what you love and lose.

Life + a cat ... adds up to an incalculable sum.

Just keep going - no feeling is final.

Tolerating is the gift from God to women!

For even the best err in words when they are meant to mean most delicate and almost inexpressible things.

Love is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack.

Life is heavier than the weight of all things.

There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.

Who speaks of conquering? To endure is everything.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

I implore those who love me to love my solitude.

Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.

I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth.

Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.

Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly.

Every angel is terrifying.

Be indulgent toward those who ... are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.

Poetic power is great, strong as a primitive instinct; it has its own unyielding rhythms in itself and breaks out as out of mountains.

Angels often do now know whether they walk among the dead or living.

But your solitude will be your home and haven even in the midst of very strange conditions, and from there you will discover all your paths.

Dying is strange and hard if it is not our death, but a death that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none within us.

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.

Nowhere, beloved, can world be but within us. Our life passes in transformation. And the external dwindles away.

Thus we live, forever taking leave.

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Books inviting us to read, on the bookshelves stand.
Piers for bridges that will lead, into Fairyland

In the night, I wish to speak with the angel to find out if she recognizes my eyes, if she will ask me: do you see Eden? And I'll reply: Eden burns.

In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive, filling it with sublimity and exaltation.

Our deepest fears are like dragons, guarding our deepest treasure.

You are the deep innerness of all things,
the last word that can never be spoken.

Perform no miracles for me, But justify Thy laws to me Which, as the years pass by me. All soundlessly unfold.

Space for the Spirit to breathe.

We lead our lives so poorly because we arrive in the present always unprepared, incapable, and too distracted for everything.

Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstanding that can gather around a new name.

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

Strangely, I heard a stranger say, I am with you.

We, hurt by ourselves, keen
to be hurters and keen
to be hurt back deep inside.
We, like weapons laid
beside anger asleep.

Particularly in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone,

Stand up during supper and walk outdoors, and keep on walking.

May you find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith ...

Death is the side of life which is turned away from us.

I believe that one is never more just than at those moments when one admires unreservedly and with absolute devotion.

What would you do, God, if I died?

It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it.

But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious.

One moment your life is a stone in you, and the next moment a star!

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

And I circle ten thousand years long; And I still don't know if I'm a falcon, a storm, or an unfinished song

Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final

We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen.

A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.

Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.

Think... of the world you carry within you.

I want to love the things as no one has thought to love them.

Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.

Who has not sat, afraid, before his heart's curtain?

Then suddenly you're left all alone
with your body that can't love you
and your will that can't save you.

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

No, my life is not this precipitous hour
through which you see me passing at a run.

Across the moment, aeons speak with aeons.
More than we experienced has gone by.

Every angel is terrible.

Never believe fate is more than the condensation of childhood.

No one can advise and help you, no one. There is only one way: go within.

He who understands one thing understands everything, for the same laws are in all.

What we do battle with is so small, what battles us is so large ...

The main thing was to be living. That was the main thing.

How he loved and yet
wished to leave you: always both, at once.

Now I come to you full of future. And from habit we begin to live our past.

To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one.

All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.

Not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree.

Trees do not force their sap, nor does the flower push its bloom.

And you suddenly know: It was here!
You pull yourself together, and there
stands an irrevocable year
of anguish and vision and prayer.