Rainer Maria Rilke

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

The only journey is the one within.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

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

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

To love is good, too: love being difficult. 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...Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

If we surrendered

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connexion with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— 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

He was a poet and hated the approximate.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— 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

Everywhere I am folded, there I am a lie.

— 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

Painting is something that takes place among the colors, and … one has to leave them alone completely, so that they can settle the matter among themselves. Their intercourse: this is the whole of painting. Whoever meddles, arranges, injects his human deliberation, his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already disturbing and clouding their activity.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

He [Cézanne] reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there’s another dog.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. 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

A tree ascended there. Oh pure transendence! a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

They more adeptly bend the willow's branches who have experience of the willow's roots.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism : they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and 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

Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

No one can advise or help you — no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

— 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

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; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Irony: Do not let yourself be governed by it, especially not in unproductive moments. In productive ones try to make use of it as one more means of seizing life.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And not our acceptance of it is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walk

— 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.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Through such impressions one gathers oneself, wins oneself back from the exacting multiplicity, which speaks and chatters there (and how talkative it is!), and one slowly learns to recognize the very few Things in which something eternal endures that one can love and something solitary that one can gently take part in.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in the hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become world, to become world for himself for another's sake. It is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Young people -it is obvious -cannot achieve such a relationship, but they can, if they understand their life properly, grow up slowly to such happiness and prepare themselves for it. They must not forget, when they love, that they are beginners, bunglers of life, apprentices in love- must learn love, and that like all learning wants peace, patience, and composure.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you.

— 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

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

— 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

All feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts you. Everything you can think of as you face your childhood, is good. Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right. 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

Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

You darkness, that I come from,

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Isn’t it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

It wasn't his, it wasn't my fault,

— Rainer Maria Rilke

I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. 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.

— 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. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in 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

Does time really exist, time the destroyer?

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Every angel is terrifying.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury, are beginning to grow lazy and indifferent; the desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare. In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one's own.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

It was not in me It came and went

— Rainer Maria Rilke

I want my own will, and I want

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Art too is just a way of living.

— 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; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

How can I keep my soul in me, so that

— Rainer Maria Rilke

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,

— Rainer Maria Rilke

In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?

— Rainer Maria Rilke

O Stunden in der Kindheit,

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Someday you will name me,

— Rainer Maria Rilke

I want to unfold.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough

— Rainer Maria Rilke

And if the world has ceased to hear you,

— 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

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

And when suddenly

— Rainer Maria Rilke

If we surrendered

— Rainer Maria Rilke

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.

— 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

How surely gravity's law,

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads

— Rainer Maria Rilke

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Amid these fading and decaying things, be the glass that rings out as it's breaking.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

To love is good, too: love being difficult. 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...Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

If we surrendered

— Rainer Maria Rilke

A billion stars go spinning through the night,

— Rainer Maria Rilke

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror

— Rainer Maria Rilke

No, we don't accomplish our love in a single year

— Rainer Maria Rilke

we want it visible

— 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

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

— Rainer Maria Rilke

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Quiet friend who has come so far,

— Rainer Maria Rilke