Quotes & Sayings About Love 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

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

Along The Sun-Drenched Roadside


Along the sun-drenched roadside, from the great
hollow half-treetrunk, which for generations
has been a trough, renewing in itself
an inch or two of rain, I satisfy
my thirst: taking the water's pristine coolness
into my whole body through my wrists.
Drinking would be too powerful, too clear;
but this unhurried gesture of restraint
fills my whole consciousness with shining water.

Thus, if you came, I could be satisfied
to let my hand rest lightly, for a moment,
lightly, upon your shoulder or your breast.


Translated by Stephen Mitchell — Rainer Maria Rilke

Put out my eyes, and I can see you still;
slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet;
and without any feet can go to you;
and tongueless, I can conjure you at will.
Break off my arms, I shall take hold of you
and grasp you with my heart as with a hand;
arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true;
and if you set this brain of mine afire,
upon my blood I then will carry you. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Believe in a love that is preserved for you like a heritage, and trust that in this love there is a strength and a blessing which you are not bound to leave behind you though you may travel far! — Rainer Maria Rilke

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

But this is what ... people are so often and disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment ...
And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half broken things that they would like to call their happiness, and their futures?
And so each of them loses himself to the other for the sake of the other person, and loses the other. And loses the vast possibilities ... in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come, nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment and poverty. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Weren't you always
distracted by expectation, as if every event
announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place
to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.) ... — Rainer Maria Rilke

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

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

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess. — 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

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

Love at first has nothing to do with unfolding, abandon and uniting with another person (for what would be the sense in a union of what is unrefined and unfinished, still second order?); for the individual it is a grand opportunity to mature, to become something in himself, to become a world, to become a world in himself for another's sake; it is a great immoderate demand made upon the self, something that singles him out and summons him to vast designs. — Rainer Maria Rilke

That's my window. This minute
So gently did I alight
From sleep--was still floating in it.
Where has my life its limit
And where begins the night?

I could fancy all things around me
Were nothing but I as yet;
Like a crystal's depth, profoundly
Mute, translucent, unlit.

I have space to spare inside me
For the stars, too: so full of room
Feels my heart; so lightly
Would it let go of him, whom

For all I know I have started
To love, it may be to hold.
Strange, as if never charted,
Stares my fortune untold.

Why is it I am bedded
Beneath this infinitude,
Fragrant like a meadow,
Hither and thither moved,

Calling out, yet fearing
Someone might hear the cry,
Destined to disappearing
Within another I. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Then suddenly you're left all alone
with your body that can't love you
and your will that can't save you. — 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

If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance. — Rainer Maria Rilke

But now that so much is changing, is it not up to us to change? Could we not try to evolve just a little, and gradually take upon ourselves our share in the labour of love? We have been spared all of its toil, and so it has slipped in among our amusements, as a scrap of genuine lace will occasionally fall into a child's toy-box, and give pleasure, and cease to give pleasure, and at lengthe lie there among broken and dismembered things, worse than all the rest. We have been spoiled by easy gratification, like all dilettantes, and are held to be masters. But what if we despised out successes? What if we began to learn, from the very start, the labour of love that has always been done for us? What if we were to go and become beginners, now that so much is changing? — Rainer Maria Rilke

Loving isn't merging, surrendering, uniting with the other. Rather, it's a kind of solitude; of profound aloneness. It induces you to mature and become whole for the sake of your beloved ... to truly love another, you must first wholly love yourself. Love therefore exacts the most demanding claim of all; it both chooses you and pursues you, and reaches out, as if over vast distances, to call and draw you into your now and future self.
John VanDyke Wilmerding, ideas put forth inspired by ('after') Rainer Maria Rilke's 'Letters to a Young Poet — Rainer Maria Rilke

Long you must suffer, knowing not what,
until suddenly out of spitefully chewed fruit your suffering's taste comes forth in you.
Then you will love almost instantly what's tasted. No one will ever talk you out of it. — 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

Isn't it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours
grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves
from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived:
the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string
to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere. — Rainer Maria Rilke

How he loved and yet
wished to leave you: always both, at once. — 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

Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly they are passed on unopened. — 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

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

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

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

I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Perhaps the great renewal of the world will consist of this, that man and woman, freed of all confused feelings and desires, shall no longer seek each other as opposites, but simply as members of a family and neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to simply, earnestly, patiently, and jointly bear the heavy responsibility of sexuality that has been entrusted to them. — Rainer Maria Rilke

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

I implore those who love me to love my solitude. — Rainer Maria Rilke

For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Love the questions themselves ... Live the questions now and have confidence that someday far into the future, [I will live my] way into the answer. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Think ... of the world which you carry within yourself ... and set it above everything that you notice about you. Your inmost happening is worth your whole love, that is what you must somehow work at, and not loose too much time and too much courage in explaining your attitude to people. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Go on loving what is good, simple, and ordinary. — Rainer Maria Rilke

It is true that many young people who do not love rightly, who simply surrender themselves and leave no room for aloneness, experience the depressing feeling of failure. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Now we wake up with our memory
and fix our gazes on that which was;
whispering sweetness, which once coursed through us,
sits silently beside us with loosened hair — Rainer Maria Rilke

Then draw near to nature. Pretend you are the very first man and then write what you see and experience, what you love and lose. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Live a while in these books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all, love them. — 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

That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. — Rainer Maria Rilke

We are the bees of the invisible. We gather the honey of the visible, and store it in the great golden honeycomb of the invisible. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Isn't it time that, in love, we freed ourselves
from the loved one and, trembling, endured:
as the arrow endures the string, collecting itself
to be more than itself as it shoots? — Rainer Maria Rilke

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

I do not wish to say that one should love death; but one should love life so magnanimously, so without calculating and selecting, that love of death (the turned-away side of life) is continually and involuntarily included - which actually happens invariably in the great motions of love, which are impetuous and illimitable. — Rainer Maria Rilke

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

Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice. — 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

This advance (at first very much against the will of the outdistanced men) will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman. And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. 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. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Love Song
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?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.
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.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person's solitude. — 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

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

I am so glad you are here. It helps me realize how beautiful my world is. — 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

I don't want to talk to anyone, lest I squander your words' echo, which ripples like a shine over mine and lends their sound a richness. — Rainer Maria Rilke

And isn't the whole world yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept. You felt in such complete harmony with God, when every morning you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could have their turn. You thought it would be shabby to save them and repair them; you used them up and held out your hands, again and again, for more world. For your love was equal to everything. — Rainer Maria Rilke

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

A complete sharing between two people is an impossibility and whenever it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a mutual agreement which robs either one member or both of his fullest freedom and development. But, once the realization is accepted that, even between the closest human beings, infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky! — Rainer Maria Rilke

To Lou: I want to see the world through you; for then I shall not be seeing the world but only you, you you! I have never seen you without thinking that I should like to pray to you. I have never heard you without thinking that I should like to believe in you. I have never longed for you without thinking that I should like to suffer for you. I have never desired you without thinking that I should be allowed to kneel before you. — Rainer Maria Rilke

There is time only to work slowly
There is no time not to love — Rainer Maria Rilke

Learn to love the questions themselves. — Rainer Maria Rilke

But now that so much is changing, isn't it time for us to change? Couldn't we try to gradually develop and slowly take upon ourselves, little by little, our part in the great task of love? We have been spared all its trouble, and that is why it has slipped in among our distractions, as a piece of real lace will sometimes fall into a child's toy-box and please him and no longer please him, and finally it lies there among the broken and dismembered toys, more wretched than any of them. We have been spoiled by superficial pleasures like dilettantes, and are looked upon as masters. But what if we despised our successes? What if we started from the very outset to learn the task of love, which has always been done for us? What if we went ahead and became beginners, now that much is changing? — 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

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

As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Isn't it time that, loving, we freed ourselves
from the beloved, and, trembling, endured:
as the arrow endures the bow, so as to be,
in its flight, something more than itself? — 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. — 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

Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish — Rainer Maria Rilke

The essence of love lies not in communion, but in the fact that each partner forces the other to become something, something infinitely great, the extreme limit of his strength. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. — 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

What happens most deeply inside you is worthy of your whole love. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Have patience with everything unresolved in you heart and try to love the questions themselves. It is possible to live and not know. — Rainer Maria Rilke

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

We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Is Abelone beautiful? I asked myself, surprised. Then I left home to go to the Academy for Young Noblemen; it was the start of a distasteful and harmful period. But there at Soro whenever I separated myself from the others and they let me stand in peace at the window I would look out in amongst the trees; and in such moments and at night the certainty grew in me that Abelone was beautiful. And I started writing her all those letters, lengthy ones and short, many of them secret letters in which I thought I was writing about Ulsgaard and about my present unhappiness . But, as I see it now, they may well have been love letters. — 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

Your inmost happening is worth your whole love, that is what you must somehow work at, and not lose too much time and too much courage in explaining — Rainer Maria Rilke

Society in its wisdom has found ways of constructing refuges of all kinds, for since it has been disposed to make the love-life a pastime, it has also felt obliged to trivialize it, to make it cheap, risk-free and secure, as public pleasures usually are. — Rainer Maria Rilke

For bel.i.eve me, the more one is, the richer is all one experiences. And whoever wants to have deep love in his life must collect and save for it and gather honey. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
So you mustn't be frightened, 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 over everything you do. You must realize 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

They (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Swells, Marina? we ocean, depths, Marina? we sky! — 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

We want it visible
to show
when even the most
visible joy
will reveal itself
only when we have
transformed it within.
there's nowhere, my love, the
world can exist
expect within. — 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

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. 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.
Letter to a Young Poet, 1903 — Rainer Maria Rilke

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

If you hold to Nature, to the simplicity that is in her, to the small detail that scarcely one man sees, which can so unexpectedly grow into something great and boundless; if you have this love for insignificant things and seek, simply as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems to be poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory, not perhaps in the understanding, which lags wondering behind, but in your innermost consciousness, wakefulness and knowing. — 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