Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

Read the lines as if they were unknown to you, and you will feel in your inmost self how very much they are yours.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

If you think your world isn’t poetic enough, or exciting enough to tell a story about, that’s not because it’s a dull world, that’s because you’re not poet enough to wake its soul up.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breatheourselves out and away; with each new heartfirewe give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us:you're in my blood, this room, Spring itselfis filled with you . . . To what end? He can't hold us,we vanish within him and around him.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

THE UNICORN: The saintly hermit, midway through his prayersstopped suddenly, and raised his eyes to witnessthe unbelievable: for there before him stoodthe legendary creature, startling white, thathad approached, soundlessly, pleading with his eyes.The legs, so delicately shaped, balanced abody wrought of finest ivory. And ashe moved, his coat shone like reflected moonlight.High on his forehead rose the magic horn, the signof his uniqueness: a tower held upright by his alert, yet gentle, timid gait.The mouth of softest tints of rose and grey, whenopened slightly, revealed his gleaming teeth,whiter than snow. The nostrils quivered faintly:he sought to quench his thirst, to rest and find repose.His eyes looked far beyond the saint's enclosure,reflecting vistas and events long vanished,and closed the circle of this ancient mystic legend.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Fame is nothing but the sum of all the misunderstandings that cluster around a new name…Wherever a human achievement becomes truly great, it seeks to hide its face in the lap of general, nameless greatness.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I believe that that love remains strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. ...live in the question.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I live my life in growing orbits which move out over this wondrous world, I am circling around God, around ancient towers and i have been circling for a thousand years. And I still dont know if I am an eagle or a storm or a great song.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

(...) there are these fading, ageing girls who constantly let themselves go over the edge without resisting, strong girls, still unused in their innermost selves, who have never been loved. Perhaps, Lord, you mean me to leave everything and go love them. Otherwise why is it so difficult for me not to follow them when they pass me in the street? Why do I suddenly invent the sweetest, most nocturnal words, and why does my voice settle sweetly inside me between my throat and heart? Why do I imagine how I, with unutterable caution, would hold them to my breath, these dolls that life has been playing with, flinging their arms apart springtime after springtime for nothing, and again for nothing, until they became slack in the shoulders. They've never fallen from a very high hope, so they're not broken; but they're badly chipped already and too far gone. Only stray cats come to them in the evening in their rooms and keep giving them furtive scratches and then sleep on top of them. Sometimes I follow one of them down a couple of streets. They walk past the houses, people are continually coming along who blot them out, they go on fading until they are nothing.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,like winter, which even now is passing.For beneath the winter is a winter so endlessthat to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing.Climb praising as you return to connection.Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient,be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.Be. And, at the same time, know what it is not to be.The emptiness inside you allows you to vibratein full resonance with your world. Use it for once.To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayablenumbers of beings abounding in Nature,add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Praise, my dear one.Let us disappear into praising.Nothing belongs to us.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

We only pass everything by like a transposition of air.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Works of Art are of an infinite loneliness.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

If your daily life seems poor do not blame it blame yourself tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are moments when something new has entered into us something unknown.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Fame is the sum of the misunderstanding that gathers about a new name.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

That is the principal thing: not to remain with the dream with the intention with the being in the mood but always forcibly to convert it into all things.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The gnarled fidelity of an old habit.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Everyone once once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Who's not sat tense before his own heart's curtain?

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest the more strongly you cultivate this belief the more will reality and the world go forth from it.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

If your daily life seems poor do not blame it blame yourself tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.... Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances... Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

~ 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.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke