Rainer Maria Rilke

“Live the questions now.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Thus we live, forever taking leave.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I would describe myself like a landscape I’ve studied at length, in detail; like a word I’m coming to understand; like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime; like my mother’s face; like a ship that carried me when the waters raged.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Space for the Spirit to breathe.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Where I create, there I am true.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Death is the side of life which is turned away from us.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy of being No-one’s sleep under so many lids.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Who speaks of conquering? To endure is everything.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“The hero is strangely akin to those who die young.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Wishes are recollections coming from the future.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Be, in this immensity of night, the magic force at your sense’s crossroad…” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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?” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life…” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Some day when I lose you, will you still be able to sleep, without me to whisper over you like a crown of linden branches?” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Trees do not force their sap, nor does the flower push its bloom.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Look: the trees exist; the houses we dwell in stand there stalwartly. Only we pass by it all, like a rush of air. And everything conspires to keep quiet about us, half out of shame perhaps, half out of some secret hope.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“The creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“The moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” ~ 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

“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“The inner, what is it: if not intensified sky hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“We are the bees of the invisible. We madly gather the honey of the visible to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I have patience for centuries in me and will live as though my time were very big.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Someday you will name me, then gently place those burning holy roses in my hair.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Works of art are born of those who confront danger, who go to the limit of an experience, to a point beyond which no human can go. The farther one ventures, the more distinctive, the more personal, the more unique life becomes.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“One moment your life is a stone in you, and the next moment a star!” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“The most visible joy can only reveal itself to us when we’ve transformed it, within.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“She followed slowly, taking a long time, As though there were some obstacles in the way; And yet: as though, once it was overcome, She would be beyond all walking, and would fly.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“There are moments in which a rose is more important than a piece of bread.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I think of you often, dear, and with such concentrated wishes that it really must help you in some way.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I want to love the things as no one has thought to love them.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Who has not sat before his own heart’s curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everthing in me that is bewildered and confused.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Animals see the unobstructed world with their whole eyes. But our eyes, turned back upon themselves, encircle and seek to snare the world, setting traps for freedom.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Fate loves to invent patterns and designs. Its difficulty lies in complexity. But life itself is difficult because of its simplicity. It has only a few things of a grandeur not fit for us.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“More unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“What is needed is, in the end, simply this: solitude, great inner solitude.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“If my devils are to leave me, I’m afraid my angels will take flight as well.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Because I never held you close, I hold you forever.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Life – a sexually transmitted terminal condition.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Every angel is terrifying.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Dig deep into your heart, where the answer spreads its roots in your being, and ask yourself solemnly, Must I write?” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Don’t you see how everything that happens is always a beginning again, and could it not be His beginning, given that beginnings are in themselves always so beautiful?” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“It is nothing but a breath, the void.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner – what is it? if not the intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“And do not change. Do not divert your love from visible things. But go on loving what is good, simple and ordinary; animals and things and flowers, and keep the balance true.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“And if I have anything else to say to you it is this: do not think that the person who is trying to console you lives effortlessly among the simple, quiet words that sometimes make you feel better. His life is full of troubles and sadness and falls far short of them. But if it were any different he could never have found the words that he did.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant…” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. Every intensification is good.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“No feeling is final.” ~ 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 all into things.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Often a star was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you out of the distant path, or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Do not despair if the answers don’t come immediately. Some answers are only revealed with the passage of time.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Comfort me from wherever you are–alone, we are quickly worn out; if I place my head on the road, let it seem softened by you. Could it be that even from afar we offer each other a gentle breath?” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.” ~ 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

“Pleas don’t above all, plant me in your heart. I grow to quick.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Truly to sing, that is a different breath.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Do not believe that the person who is trying to offer you solace lives his life effortlessly among the simple and quiet words that might occasionally comfort you. His life is filled with much hardship and sadness, and it remains far behind yours. But if it were otherwise, he could never have found these words.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work. Help me in saying it, to understand it.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Yet everything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin’s bow, which draws one voice out of two separate strings.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you’ve learned, but in the questions you’ve learned how to ask yourself.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Across the moment, aeons speak with aeons. More than we experienced has gone by.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over – one of them, ah, even one, is already too much for my blood. Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“It is clear that we must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance.” ~ 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

“If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“We are not allowed to linger, even with what is most intimate.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Solitude is nothing that one can choose or retrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“What goes on in your innermost being is worth all your love, this is what you must work on however you can and not waste too much time and too much energy on clarifying your attitude to other people.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Is not impermanence the very fragrance of our days?” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“The world of sexuality it finds is not entirely mature and pure, it is not human enough, only virile, rut, intoxication, restlessness, and weighed down by the old prejudices and arrogance with which men have disfigured and overburdened love.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Earth, is not this what you will: in us to rise up invisible? Is it, O Earth, not your dream once to be wholly invisible? Earth! Invisible! What, if not change, is your desperate mission?” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Nearly everything that matters is a challenge, and everything matters.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Deeply I go down into myself. My god is Dark and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I am so glad you are here. It helps me realize how beautiful my world is.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confidence in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Everything must be carried to term before it is born. To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“You must change your life.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Things are not all as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe; most events are unsayable. occur in a space that no word has ever penetrated.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Our own heart always exceeds us.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Never believe fate is more than the condensation of childhood.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Works of Art are of an infinite loneliness.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Only in the realm of Praising should Lament walk, the naiad of the wept-for fountain, watching over the stream of our complaint, to keep it clear upon the very stone that bears the arch of triumph and the altar. –.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“We make our way through Everything like thread passing through fabric, giving shape to images that we ourselves do not know.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false…” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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

“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Our task is to listen to the news that is always arriving out of silence.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Only those sadnesses are dangerous and bad which one carries about among people in order to drown them out; like sicknesses that are superficially and foolishly treated they simply withdraw and after a little pause break out again the more dreadfully; and accumulate within one and are life, are unlived, spurned, lost life, of which one may die.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I implore those who love me to love my solitude.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Our heart always transcends us.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“To be here is immense.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“The longer i live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed into magnificent sense.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Irony: Don’t let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I know of no other advice than this: Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“We ignore the gods and fill our minds with trash.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I feel it now: there’s a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has need me…” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand already quite near its transformation.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Go into yourself. Dig into yourself for a deep answer.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“They, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Be-and yet know the great void where all things begin, the infinite source of your own most intense vibration, so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Just keep going – no feeling is final.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Let everything happen to you Beauty and terror Just keep going No feeling is final.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the the hour of the new clarity.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Life is heavier than the weight of all things.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive, filling it with sublimity and exaltation.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Was soll ich mit meinem Munde? Mit meiner Nacht? Mit meinem Tag? Ich habe keine Geliebte, kein Haus, keine Stelle auf der ich lebe.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Be patient with all that is unsolved in your life. Learn to love the questions themselves, until some distant day, without your knowing, you will have lived into the answers.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Every intensification is good, if it is in your entire blood, if it isn’t intoxication or muddiness, but joy which you can see into, clear to the bottom.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I believe that nothing that is real can pass away.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Now for some heartwork.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Strangely, I heard a stranger say, I am with you.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“May you find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith…” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ 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

“And the heart has become so tired, and the longing so vast.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“For there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“All things want to float.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Bound by conventions, people tend to reach for what is easy. Here we must be unafraid of what is difficult. For all living beings in nature must unfold in their particular way and become themselves despite all opposition.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“The point is to live everything.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Never forget to make a wish, Malte. You should never give up wishing. I believe there is no such thing as fulfillment, but there are wishes, and they go on lasting, your whole lifetime, so that you couldn’t wait long enough for them to be fulfilled even if you wanted to.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“The only journey is the one within.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“If the angel deigns to come it will be because you have convinced her, not by tears but by your humble resolve to be always beginning; to be a beginner.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“It is still this death which continues inside of me, which works in me, which transforms my heart, which deepens the red of my blood, which bears down heavily on the life that had been ours so that this death becomes a bittersweet drop coursing through my veins and permeating everything, and which ought to be mine forever.” ~ 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

“Girls, there are poets who learn from you to say, what you, in your aloneness, are; and they learn through you to live distantness, as the evenings through the great stars become accustomed to eternity.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“There is only one journey. Going inside yourself.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“There is time only to work slowly There is no time not to love.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“We are unutterably alone essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Understand, I’ll slip quietly away from the noisy crowd when I see the pale stars rising, blooming, over the oaks. I’ll pursue solitary pathways through the pale twilit meadows with only this one dream: You come too.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Shattered people are best represented by bits and pieces.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“You must realise that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Look, we don’t love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth.” ~ 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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Don’t observe yourself too closely. Don’t be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Is it possible that despite our inventions and progress, despite our culture, religion and knowledge of the world, we have remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that even that surface, which might still have been something, has been covered with unbelievably boring material, leaving it looking like drawing-room furniture in the summer holidays.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“What we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard – of, must be possible in it. This is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most inexplicable.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“She who reconciles the ill-matched threads Of her life, and weaves them gratefully Into a single cloth – It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall And clears it for a different celebration.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again. But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the earth, seems irrevocable.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by greater and greater beings.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“He does not always remain bent over the pages; he often leans back and closes his eyes over a line he has been reading again, and its meaning spreads through his blood.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Truly it is glorious, our being here.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakable tender hand, placed beside another thread and held and carried by a hundred others.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Speaking of August Rodin: He raised his world above us in an immense arc, and made it a part of nature.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“No one can advise and help you, no one. There is only one way: go within.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“You are nearing the land that is life; you will recognize it by its seriousness.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Everywhere I am folded, there I am a lie.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Huge lemons, cut in slices, would sink like setting suns into the dusky sea, softly illuminating it with their radiating membranes, and its clear, smooth surface aquiver from the rising bitter essence.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build…” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“You are also the physician who must watch over yourself. But in the course of every illness there are many days in which the physician can do nothing but wait.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“To be silent, to keep myself absolutely hidden, nothing else.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Do you remember how life yearned out of childhood toward the “great thing?” I see that it is now yearning forth beyond the great thing toward the greater one.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Those doves below, the ones utterly cared for, never endangered ones, cannot know tenderness.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Ist dir Trinken bitter, werde Wein.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“You, darkness, of whom I am born- I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes the rest.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way-and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“As the arrow endures the string, and in the gathering momentum becomes more than itself. Because to stay is to be nowhere.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Now I come to you full of future. And from habit we begin to live our past.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading!” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“What batters you becomes your strength.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Don’t take my devils away, because my angels may flee too.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Our deepest fears are like dragons, guarding our deepest treasure.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“But you, divine poet, you sang on till the end as the swarm of rejected maenads attacked you, shrieking, you overpowered their noise with harmony, and from pure destruction arose your transfigured song.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Be forever dead in Eurydice-more gladly arise into the seamless life proclaimed in your song. Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days, be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“So you mustn’t be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety – like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in the palm of its hand and will not let you fall.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“The natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and with time to other insights… Everything is a gestation and then bringing forth.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Everything in the world of things and animals is still filled with happening, which you can take part in.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb creatures in the world’s full reserve, the unsayable sums, joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation. When something’s let go of, it circles; and though we are rarely the center of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I am the rest between two notes which are somehow always in discord.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Always trust yourself and your own feelings, as opposed to arguments and discussions. If it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“So don’t be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don’t know what work they are accomplishing within you?” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“And if there is one thing more that I must say to you, it is this: Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity. In this manner of its origin lies its true estimate: there is no other. Therefore, my dear Sir, I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths whence your life wells forth; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“It is part of the nature of every definitive love that sooner or later it can reach the beloved only in infinity.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Works of art always spring from those who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go. The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“You know that I am not one of those individuals who neglect their body in order to turn it into an offering for their soul; my soul would not at all have appreciated such a sacrifice.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Draw near to Nature. Then try like some first human being to say what you see and experience and love and lose.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“And even if you were in some prison, the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses – would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories?” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Doch wie ich mich auch in mich selber neige: Mein Gott ist dunkel und wie ein Gewebe von hundert Wurzeln, welche schweigsam trinken.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Do not be bewildered by the surfaces: in the depths all becomes law.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Go on loving what is good, simple, and ordinary.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Resolve to be always beginning-to be a beginner!” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love. Death stands before eternity and says YES.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Think, dear Sir, of the world that you carry inside you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own – only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it, and not lose too much time or too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Wanting to change, to improve, a person’s situation means offering him, for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced, other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“But there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Ultimately, and precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone; and many things must happen, many things must go right, a whole constellation of events must be fulfilled, for one human being to successfully advise or help another.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“The main thing was to be living. That was the main thing.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart…” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Do not allow yourself to be misled by the surfaces of things.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Never has grief been possessed, never has love been learned, and what removes us in death is not revealed.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Everything is gestation and then birthing.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Everything terrible is something that needs our love.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Since I’ve learned to be silent, everything has come so much closer to me.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly they are passed on unopened.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Most people have turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Fame, that public destruction of one in process of becoming, into whose building-ground the mob breaks, displacing his stones.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“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.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke