Poet Rilke Quotes & Sayings

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

Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other
people passes by, far in the distance. — Rainer Maria Rilke

My dad wanted to name me after Rainier Maria Rilke, the poet. — Rainn Wilson

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

And those who come together in the night and are entwined in rocking delight do an earnest work and gather sweetnesses, gather depth and strength for the song of some coming poet, who will arise to speak of ecstasies beyond telling. — 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

If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Read the lines as if they were unknown to you, and you will feel in your inmost self how very much they are yours. — 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

Rilke used to say that no poet would mind going to gaol, since he would at least have time to explore the treasure house of his memory. In many respects Rilke was a prick. — Clive James

Most events are inexpressible, and take place in a sphere that no word has ever entered. Most inexpressible of all are works of art, existences full of secrets whose life continues alongside ours, while ours is transitory. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Even when the lights go out, even when someone says to me: "It's over---," even when from the stage a gray gust of emptiness drifts toward me,
even when not one silent ancestor sits beside me anymore---not a woman, not even the boy with the brown squint-eye:
I'll sit here anyway. One can always watch. — Rainer Maria Rilke

What poet's persuasion can reconcile the length of those days with the brevity of life? — Rainer Maria Rilke

... People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet — Alice Walker

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

Once the meaning of suffering had been revealed to us, we refused to minimize or alleviate the camp's tortures by ignoring them or harboring false illusions and entertaining artificial optimism. Suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn our backs. We had realized its hidden opportunities for achievement, the opportunities which caused the poet Rilke to write, "Wie viel ist aufzuleiden!" (How much suffering there is to get through!). — Viktor E. Frankl

The Western poet Rainer Maria Rilke has said that our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure.12 — Sogyal Rinpoche

Rainer Maria Rilke was admittedly not a Dockers tagger, but a sort of European equivalent: a German poet - in many respects, a charlatan masquerading as a genius who turned out to be a genius. — Richard Flanagan

The word passion means basically "to be affected," and passion is the essential energy of the soul. The poet Rilke describes this passive power in the imagery of the flower's structure, when he calls it a "muscle of infinite reception." We don't often think of the capacity to be affected as strength and as the work of a powerful muscle, and yet for the soul, as for the flower, this is its toughest work and its main role in our lives. Things — Thomas Moore

I believe that almost all our sorrows are moments of tension which we experience as a paralysis, because we no longer hear our estranged feelings living. Because we are alone with the strange thing that has entered into us; because for a moment everything familiar and customary has been taken from us; because we stand in the middle of a crossing where we cannot remain standing. — 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

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

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

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

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 think about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke who said that it's the questions that move us, not the answers. As a writer, I believe that it's our task, our responsibility, to hold the mirror up to social injustices that we see and to create a prayer of beauty. The questions serve us in that capacity. — Terry Tempest Williams

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

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

We know from accounts of Rilke's life that his stay in Rodin's workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. The poet's view of the mutilated body thus has nothing to do with the previous century's Romanticism of fragments and ruins; it is part of the breakthrough in modern art to the concept of the object that states itself with authority and the body that publicizes itself with authorization. — Peter Sloterdijk

What the poet has to say to the torso of the supposed Apollo, however, is more than a note on an excursion to the antiquities collection. The author's point is not that the thing depicts an extinct god who might be of interest to the humanistically educated, but that the god in the stone constitutes a thing-construct that is still on air. We are dealing with a document of how newer message ontology outgrew traditional theologies. Here, being itself is understood as having more power to speak and transmit, and more potent authority, than God, the ruling idol of religions. In modern times, even a God can find himself among the pretty figures that no longer mean anything to us - assuming they do not become openly irksome. The thing filled with being, however, does not cease to speak to us when its moment has come. — Peter Sloterdijk

Depict your sorrows and desires, your passing thoughts and beliefs in some kind of beauty- depict all that with heartfelt, quiet, humble sincerity and use to express yourself the things that surround you,the images of your dreams and the objects of your memory. If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it; accuse yourself, tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches; since for the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place. — Rainer Maria Rilke

It is clear enough that not every something can be elevated to the rank of a thing - otherwise everything and everyone would be speaking once more, and the chatter would spread from humans to things. Rilke privileges two categories of 'entities' [Seienden), to express it in the papery diction of philosophy, that are eligible for the lofty task of acting as message-things - artifices and living creatures - with the latter gaining their particular quality from the former, as if animals were being's highest works of art before humans. Inherent to both is a message energy that does not activate itself, but requires the poet as a decoder and messenger. — Peter Sloterdijk

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

The goal is not to answer these questions. The goal is to be present to them with all that we are. In a way we are following the poet Rilke's advice when he counseled the young artist, be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along into the answer. — Adam Bucko

Rilke wrote in one of my favourite books [Letters to a Young Poet], "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." It takes courage to live as our true selves; especially when doing so can be faced with such unkindness. But I believe the more we show of ourselves, the more we make space for positive change in the world. I feel so grateful I get to be a part of a series that is contributing to that change. — Elise Bauman