Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes & Sayings

Our being is continually undergoing and entering upon changes ... We must, strictly speaking, at every moment give each other up and let each other go and not hold each other back. — 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

Truly being here is glorious. — Rainer Maria Rilke

And one of the things I find most moving is the way people with infirmities manage to embrace Life, and from the cool flowers by the wayside reach conclusions about the vast splendour of its great gardens. They can, if their souls' strings are finely tuned, arrive with much less effort at the feeling of eternity; for everything we do, they may dream. And precisely where our deeds end, theirs begin to bear fruit. — Rainer Maria Rilke

We only pass everything by
like a transposition of air. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Spring has again returned.
The Earth is like a child that knows many poems.
Many, O so many. For the hardship
of such long learning she receives the prize.
Strict was her teacher.
The white in the old man's beard pleases us.
Now, what to call green, to call blue,
we dare to ask: She knows, She knows! — Rainer Maria Rilke

Who speaks of conquering? To endure is everything. — 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

Be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything else ... What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it. — Rainer Maria Rilke

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. — Rainer Maria Rilke

And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into
O endlessly
us! Whoever, finally, we may be. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Someday you will name me,
then gently place those burning
holy roses in my hair.
[Songs of Longing] — 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

No waiting the beyond, no peering toward it,
but longing to degrade not even death;
we shall learn earthliness, and serve its ends,
to feel its hands about us like a friend's. — Rainer Maria Rilke

You don't survive in me
because of memories;
nor are you mine because
of a lovely longing's strength.
What does make you present
is the ardent detour
that a slow tenderness
traces in my blood.
I do not need
to see you appear;
being born sufficed for me
to lose you a little less. — 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

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

There is only one solitude, and it is great and is not easy to bear, and to almost everyone there come hours when they would gladly exchange it for some kind of communion, however banal and cheap, for the appearance of some slight harmony with the most easily available, with the most undeserving. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Verses are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough)
they are experiences. For the sake of a verse one must see many cities, men, and things, one must know the animals feel how birds fly, and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning. — 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

O smile, going where? O upturned look:
new, warm, receding surge of the heart
;
alas, we are that surge. Does then the
cosmic space
we dissolve in taste of us? Do the
angels
reclaim only what is theirs, their own
outstreamed existence,
or sometimes, by accident, does a bit
of us
get mixed in? Are we blended in their
features
like the slight vagueness that
complicates the looks
of pregnant women? Unnoticed by them
in their
whirling back into themselves? (How
could they notice?) — Rainer Maria Rilke

O shooting star
that fell into my eyes and through my body-:
not to forget you. To endure. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The Letters to a young poet illustrate perfectly the kindliness, the complexity, and at the same time the impersonality and remoteness of Rilke's manner with unknown correspondents. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Let me put aside every desire, so that my heart grows used to its farthest spaces. Better that it live fully aware, in the terror of its stars, than as if protected, soothed by what is near. — Rainer Maria Rilke

It wasn't his, it wasn't my fault, we both had nothing except patience, but Death has none. I saw him come (how meanly!) and I watched him as he took and took: none of it I could claim as mine. — Rainer Maria Rilke

If it were possible for us to see further than our knowledge extends and out a little over the outworks of our surmising, perhaps we should then bear our sorrows with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new, something unknown, has entered us. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XII
Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away. — 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

And yet they are in us, those who have long since passed away, as natural disposition, as burden on our destiny, as blood that throbs, and as gesture that rises up out of the depths of time. — Rainer Maria Rilke

My eyes already touch the sunny hill. Going far ahead of the road I have begun. So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp; it has inner light, even from a distance- and charges us, even if we do not reach it, into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are; a gesture waves us on answering our own wave ... but what we feel is the wind in our faces. — Rainer Maria Rilke

IN APRIL Again the woods are odorous, the lark Lifts on upsoaring wings the heaven gray That hung above the tree-tops, veiled and dark, Where branches bare disclosed the empty day. After long rainy afternoons an hour Comes with its shafts of golden light and flings Them at the windows in a radiant shower, And rain drops beat the panes like timorous wings. Then all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep By the soft sound of rain that slowly dies; And cradled in the branches, hidden deep In each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Again and again, however we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others
fall: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers, face to face with the sky. — Rainer Maria Rilke

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

But there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final — Rainer Maria Rilke

Beauty will become paltry and insignificant when one looks for it only in what is pleasing; there it might be found occasionally but it resides and lies awake in each thing where it encloses itself, and it emerges only for the individual who believes that it is present everywhere and who will not move on until he has stubbornly coaxed it forth. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Temples are no longer known. It is we who secretly save up
these extravagances of the heart. Where one of them still
survives,
a Thing that was formerly prayed to, worshipped, knelt
before
just as it is, it passes into the invisible world.
Many no longer perceive it, yet miss the chance
to build it inside themselves now, with pillars and statues:
greater. — Rainer Maria Rilke

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

If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches — Rainer Maria Rilke

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 with them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. — Rainer Maria Rilke

...in the depths everything becomes law. — Rainer Maria Rilke

And if what is near you is far away, then your vastness is already among the stars and is very great; be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. — Rainer Maria Rilke

It is nothing but a breath, the void. — Rainer Maria Rilke

For this reason, my dear Sir, the only advice I have is this: to go into yourself and to examine the depths from which your life springs; at its source you will find the answer to the question of whether you have to write. Accept this answer as it is, without seeking to interpret it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then assume this fate and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking after the rewards that may come from outside. For he who creates must be a world of his own and find everything within himself and in the natural world that he has elected to follow. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Among people, particularly those I love, I so easily get talking and give out everything possible in conversation, so that it is not available for my work. It is a stupid piece of clumsiness that I am so wanting in the gift of sociability, the talent for easy but at the same time recreative conversations, in which one does not exert and expend oneself (Letters 1906-1907, p. 118). — Rainer Maria Rilke

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

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

To write rhythmic prose one must go deep into oneself and find the anonymous and multiple rhythm of the blood. Prose needs to be built like a cathedral. There, one is truly without a name, without ambition, without help; on scaffoldings, alone with one's consciousness. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Look, lovers: almost separately they come towards us through the flowery grass and slowly; parting's so far from thought of, they indulge the extravagance of walking unembraced. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The thought of being a creator, of engendering, of shaping is nothing without the continuous great confirmation and embodiment in the world, nothing without the thousandfold assent from Things and animals ... beautiful and rich only because it is full of inherited memories of the engendering and birthing of millions. — Rainer Maria Rilke

No, we don't accomplish our love in a single year as the flowers do; an immemorial sap flows up through our arms when we love. Dear girl, this: that we loved, inside us, not One who would someday appear, but seething multitudes; not just a single child, but also the fathers lying in our depths like fallen mountains; also the dried-up riverbeds of ancient mothers-;also the whole soundless landscape under the clouded or clear sky of its destiny -; all this, my dear, preceded you. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Truly it is glorious, our being here. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Of all my books, I find only a few indispensible. — 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

You, yesterday's boy,
to whom confusion came:
Listen, lest you forget who you are.
It was not pleasure you fell into. It was joy.
You were called to be bridegroom,
though the bride coming toward you is your shame.
What chose you is the great desire.
Now all flesh bares itself to you.
On pious images pale cheeks
blush with a strange fire.
Your senses uncoil like snakes
awakened by the beat of the tambourine.
Then suddenly you're left all alone
with your body that can't love you
and your will that can't save you.
But now, like a whispering in dark streets,
rumors of God run through your dark blood. — Rainer Maria Rilke

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

Take the destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and
its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For 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 hero is strangely akin to those who die young. — 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

Sin is the most wonderfully roundabout path to God — Rainer Maria Rilke

Is not impermanence the very fragrance of our days? — Rainer Maria Rilke

If your everyday life appears to be unworthy subject matter, do not complain to life. Complain to yourself, Lament that you are not poet enough to call up its wealth. — 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

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

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

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

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

My God, if any of it could be shared! But would it "be" then, would it "be"? No, it "is" only at the price of solitude. — Rainer Maria Rilke

In those small towns you come to realize how the cathedrals utterly outgrew their whole environment. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The more we speak of solitude, the clearer it becomes that at the bottom it is not something one can choose to take or leave. We are lonely. One can deceive oneself about it and act as if it were not so. That is all. But it is so much better to see that we are so, indeed even to presuppose it. It will make us dizzy, of course; because all the focal points on which our eyes were used to resting are taken away from us, there is nothing near us anymore, and everything distant is infinitely distant. — 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

In the room ... they are inside the books. They move sometimes within the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Nearly everything that matters is a challenge, and everything matters. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The flower bends when the wind wants it to, and you must become like that-that is, filled with deep # trust . — 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

But perhaps these are the very hours during which solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of spring. But that must not confuse you. What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grownups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn't understand a thing about what they were doing. — Rainer Maria Rilke

But when I lean over the chasm of myself -
it seems
my God is dark
and like a web: a hundred roots
silently drinking.

This is the ferment I grow out of.

More I don't know, because my branches
rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind. — Rainer Maria Rilke

What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love; you must somehow keep working at it and not lose too much time and too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people.
Rilke, Rainer Maria (1993-09-17). Letters to a Young Poet (p. 22). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, XII
Bless the spirit that makes connections,
for truly we live in what we imagine.
Clocks move along side our real life
with steps that are ever the same.
Though we do not know our exact location,
we are held in place by what links us.
Across trackless distances
antennas sense each other.
Pure attention, the essence of the powers!
Distracted by each day's doing,
how can we hear the signals?
Even as the farmer labors
there where the seed turns into summer,
it is not his work. It is Earth who gives. — Rainer Maria Rilke

True singing is a different breath, about nothing. — Rainer Maria Rilke

What else can I tell you? It seems to me that everything has its proper emphasis; and finally I want to add just one more bit of advice: to keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your whole development; you couldn't disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to questions that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Turn towards great and serious subjects, next to which irony becomes small and helpless. — Rainer Maria Rilke

I have a notion that, at big fires, a moment of extreme suspense can sometimes occur, when the jets of water slacken off, the firemen no longer climb, no one moves a muscle. Without a sound, a high black wall of masonry cants over up above, the fire blazing behind it, and, without a sound, leans, about to topple. Everyone stands waiting, shoulders tensed, faces drawn in around their eyes, for the terrible crash. That is how the silence is here. — 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

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

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

You, you only, exist.
We pass away, till at last,
our passing is so immense
that you arise: beautiful moment,
in all your suddenness,
arising in love, or enchanted
in the contraction of work.
To you I belong, however time may
wear me away. From you to you
I go commanded. In between
the garland is hanging in chance; but if you
take it up and up and up: look:
all becomes festival! — Rainer Maria Rilke

They grope before them like blind people and find each the other as they would a door. Almost like children that dread the night, they press close into each other. And yet they are not afraid. There is nothing that might be against them: no yesterday, no morrow; for time is shattered. And they flower from its ruins.
He does not ask: 'Your husband?'
She does not ask: 'Your name?'
For indeed they have found each other, to be unto themselves a new generation.
They will give each other a hundred new names and take them all off again, gently, as one takes an earring off. — 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

Lord, it is time. The summer was very big. Lay thy shadow on the sundials, and on the meadows let the winds go loose. Command the last fruits that they shall be full; give them another two more southerly days, press them on to fulfillment and drive the last sweetiness into the heavenly wine. — Rainer Maria Rilke

May you find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith ... — Rainer Maria Rilke

There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, "I must," then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Just be sure that you observe carefully what wells up within you and place that above everything that you notice around you. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Our task is to listen to the news that is always arriving out of silence. — 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