Quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings.

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

Just keep going - no feeling is final.

A carefree letting go of oneself, not a caution, but a wise blindness.

We are all falling. This hand's falling,too -- all have this falling-sickness none withstands. And yet there's one whose gently-holding hands this universal falling can't fall through.

We're still reminded-: sometimes by a rain, but we can no longer say what it means; life was never again so filled with meeting, with reunion and with passing on.

The only journey is the journey within.

The main thing was being alive. That was the main thing.

I'm still alive, I have time to build
My blood will outlast the rose.

Do not be bewildered by the surfaces: in the depths all becomes law.

If the Angel deigns to appear, it will be because you have convinced him, not by tears but by your humble resolve to be always beginning -- to be a Beginner!

Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.

One of the most difficult tests for the creator: he must always remain unconscious, unaware of his best virtues, if he doesn't want to rob them of their candor and innocence.

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.

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

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

That is longing: To dwell in the flux of things,
To have no home in the present.
And these are wishes: gentle dialogues
Of the poor hours with eternity.

It seems to me that the only way one can be helpful is to extend one's hand to someone else involuntarily, and without ever knowing how useful this will be.

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

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build.

This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us.

Whoever you are, go out into the evening,
leaving your room, of which you know every bit;
your house is the last before the infinite,
whoever you are.

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

Irony: Don't let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments.

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 all into things.

Nothing makes it more difficult to help than the intention of doing so.

To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before this one. (Letters on Life).

The artist's experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss.

As the arrow endures the string, and in the gathering momentum becomes more than itself. Because to stay is to be nowhere.

Fame -- the aggregate of all the misunderstandings that collect around a new name.

Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly.

One must never despair upon losing something, whether it's an individual or an experience of joy or happiness; everything returns even more magnificently.

The creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.

But to be what I am, to live what I was meant to live, to want to sound like no one else, to yield the blossoms dictated to my heart: this is what I want -- and this surely cannot be arrogance. (Letters on Life).

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.

Ultimately nobody can help anyone else in life; one has this recurring experience in every conflict and confusion: that one is alone. (Letters on Life).

There are moments in which a rose is more important than a piece of bread.

How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?

Basically, if it is good, one can't live to see it recognized: otherwise it's just half good and not reckless enough.

What an unilateral life, when from the material of a renunciation, we must fashion something we love.

Wishes are recollections coming from the future.

Religion is something infinitely simple, ingenuous. It is not knowledge, not content of feeling... it is not duty and not renunciation, it is not restriction: but in the infinite extent of the universe it is a direction of the heart.

But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is-solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.

I am like a child who awakes At the light, so safe and secureFree from night's fears when dawn breaks, In Thee I am ever secure.

He was a worker whose only desire was to penetrate with all his forces into the humble and difficult significance of his tools. Therein lay a certain renunciation of Life, but in just this renunciation lay his triumph, for Life entered into his work.

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.

Fame, that public destruction of one in process of becoming, into whose building-ground the mob breaks, displacing his stones.

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.

But it is over now; I have survived it.

Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love.

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.

What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love.

For sometime now I have believed that it is our own force, all our own force that is still too great for us. It is true that we do not know it; but is it not just that which is most our own of which we know the least?

Oh longing for places that were not Cherished enough in that fleeting hour How I long to make good from afar The forgotten gesture, the additional act.

In later years it would sometimes happen that I'd wake up at night and see the stars so real in the sky and so meaningful in their course, and couldn't understand how anyone could bring themselves to miss so much of the world.

Perhaps everything terrifying is deep down a helpless thing that needs our help.

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

It's possible, I'm moving through the hard veins of heavy mountains, like an arc, alone; I'm so deep inside, I see no end in sight, and no distance: everything is getting near and everything near is turning to stone.

Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.

Again and again in history some people wake up. They have no ground in the crowd and move to broader deeper laws. They carry strange customs with them and demand room for bold and audacious action. The future speaks ruthlessly through them. They change the world.

Somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work. Help me in saying it, to understand it.

Life and death: they are one, at core entwined. Who understands himself from his own strain presses himself into a drop of wine and throws himself into the purest flame.

Perhaps it requires of you precisely this existential anxiety in order to begin. Precisely these days of transition are perhaps the period when everything in you is working.

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you.

A birdsong can even, for a moment, make the whole world into a sky within us, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between its heart and the world's.

Sometime we will have to stop overevaluating the word. We shall learn to realize that it is only one of the many bridges that connect the island of our soul with the great continent of common life... the broadest, perhaps, but in no way the most refined.

Never believe fate is more than the condensation of childhood.

Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.

Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.

Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything.

Dig deep into your heart, where the answer spreads its roots in your being, and ask yourself solemnly, Must I write?

Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander on the boulevards, up and down, restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing.

Every angel is terrifying.

A kind of memory that tells us that what we're now striving for was once nearer and truer and attached to us with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, there it was breath. After the first home the second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.

We wasters of sorrows! How we stare away into sad endurance beyond them, trying to foresee their end! Whereas they are nothing else than our winter foliage, our sombre evergreen, one of the seasons of our interior year.

This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.

I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all.

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

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

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.

As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still, it is we who move in infinite space.