Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

I'm still alive, I have time to build My blood will outlast the rose.

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!

Whoever you are: in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything;

The trees which you planted as a child Have long since grown too heavy; you do not deceive them. But the winds ... but the spaces ... Raise no monument. For it is the roses Which salute Him year by year with their petals. This, you see, is Orpheus

No one would dream of expecting a single individual to be happy—once someone is married, however, everyone is very astonished when he is not happy!

I would finally just like to advise you to grow through your development quietly and seriously; you can interrupt it in no more violent manner than by looking outwards, and expecting answer from outside to questions which perhaps only your innermost feeling in your most silent hour can answer.

We can so easily slip back from what we have struggled to attain, abruptly, into a life we never wanted; can find that we are trapped, as in a dream, and die there, without ever waking up. This can occur. Anyone who has lifted his blood into a years-long work may find that he can't sustain it, the force of gravity is irresistible, and it falls back, worthless. For somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work.

Und man hat niemand und nichts und faehrt in der Welt herum mit einem Koffer und mit einer Bücherkiste und eigentlich ohne Neugierde.

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. And even if you were in a prison whose walls did not let any sound of the world outside reach your senses - would you not have your childhood still, this marvellous, lavish source, this treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention towards that.

If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always 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.

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

My old furniture is rotting in a barn where I was permitted to store it, and as for myself, dear God, I don't have a roof over my head and it is raining into my eyes.

If somewhere deep within me arises some essence of having been a child, one I never experienced, perhaps the purest childness of my childhood, I don't want to know it. Without even looking, I want to form an angel out of it and hurl him into the foremost rank of screaming angels, to remind God.

Nikad ne treba o?ajavati, kad se nešto izgubi, osoba ili radost ili sre?a; sve se još divnije vra?a. Što otpasti mora, otpada, što nama pripada, uz nas ostaje, jer sve se po zakonima odvija, koji su ve?i od naše spoznaje i s kojima smo samo nao?igled u suprotnosti. Treba u sebi živeti i na celi život misliti, na sve svoje milijone mogu?nosti, širine i budu?nosti, naspram kojih ne postoji ni prošlo niti izgubljeno.

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.

Nous sommes en avant tout à fait comme des nostalgies. C'est au loin, dans des arrière-plans éclatants, qu'ont lieu nos épanouissements. C'est là que sont mouvement et volonté. C'est là que se situent les histoires dont nous sommes des titres obscurs. C'est là qu'ont lieu nos accords, nos adieux, consolation et deuil. C'est là que nous sommes, alors qu'au premier plan nous allons et venons.

Gefährlich und schlecht sind nur jene Traurigkeiten, die man unter die Leute trägt, um sie zu übertönen; wie Krankheiten, die oberflächlich und töricht behandelt werden, treten sie nur zurück und brechen nach einer kleinen Pause um so furchtbarer aus; und sammeln sich an im Innern und sind Leben, sind ungelebtes, verschmähtes, verlorenes Leben, an dem Man sterben kann.

But sing, when you must, of great lovers: their fame has a long way to go before it's really immortal. Those you almost envied, the unrequited, whom you found more loving than the gratified, the content— begin again and again the praise you can never fully express.

Things are not as easy to understand or express as we are mostly led to believe; most of what happens cannot be put into words and takes place in a realm which no word has ever entered.

Whom will you cry to, heart? More and more lonely, your path struggles on through incomprehensible mankind. All the more futile perhaps for keeping to its direction, keeping on toward the future, toward what has been lost. Once. You lamented? What was it? A fallen berry of jubilation, unripe. But now the whole tree of my jubilation is breaking, in the storm it is breaking, my slow tree of joy. Loveliest in my invisible landscape, you that made me more known to the invisible angels.

We don't know the contour of feeling; we only know what molds it from without.

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.

Angels (it is said) are often never quite sure whether they pass among the living or the dead.

Death is great. We are his completely with laughing eyes. When we feel ourselves immersed in life, he dares to weep immersed in us. (Der Tod ist groß. Wir sind die Seinen lachenden Munds. Wenn wir uns mitten im Leben meinen, wagt er zu weinen mitten in uns.)