Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

A world will come over you, the happiness, the abundance, the incomprehensible immensity of a world. Live a while in these books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be repaid you a thousand and a thousand times, and however your life may turn,—it will, I am certain of it, run through the fabric of your growth as one of the most important threads among all the threads of your experience, disappointments and joys.

Some day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer signify merely an opposite of the masculine, but something in itself, something that makes one think, not of any complement and limit, but only of life and existence: the feminine human being. - Rilke

À travers nous s'envolent Les oiseaux en silence. O, moi qui veux grandir Je regarde au dehors, et l'arbre en moi grandit.

Seule, ô abondante fleur, tu crées ton propre espace; tu te mires dans und glace d'odeur. Ton parfum entoure comme d'autres pétales ton innombrable calice. Je te retiens, tu t'étales, prodigieuse actrice.

Only those sadnesses are dangerous and bad which one carries about among people in order to drown them out; like sicknesses that are superficially and foolishly treated they simply withdraw and after a little pause break out again the more dreadfully; and accumulate within one and are life, are unlived, spurned, lost life, of which one may die.

Ne parlons pas de toi. Tu es ineffable selon ta nature. D'autres fleurs ornent la table que tu transfigures. On te met dans un simple vase -, voici que tout change: c'est peut-être la même phrase, mais chantée par un ange.

Beauty is but the beginning of terror. We can barely endure it and are awed when it declines to destroy us.

La solitude qui enveloppe les oeuvres d'art est infinie, etil n'estrien qui permette de moins les atteindre que la critique. Seul l'amour peut les appréhender, les saisir et faire preuve de justesse à leur endroit:

Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.

Não há nada que toque menos uma obra de arte do que palavras de crítica: elas não passam de mal-entendidos mais ou menos afortunados.

You are not dead yet, it's not too late to open your depths by plunging into them and drink in the life that reveals itself quietly there.

It seems to him there are a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.

I want to utter you. I want to portray you not with lapis or gold, but with colors made of apple bark. There is no image I could invent that your presence would not eclipse.

Aufklärung heißt nichts anderes, als die Unschuld messen mit dem Maaße der Schuld!

I think of you at any time of the day and my worried thoughts accompany all your steps. The slightest breath on your forehead is a kiss from my lips and each dream speaks to you with my voice. My love is like a coat wrapped around you to protect and warm you up." —from letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé

And how bewildered is any womb-born creature that has to fly. As if terrified and fleeing from itself, it zigzags through the air, the way a crack runs through a teacup. So the bat quivers across the porcelain of evening.

And you wait. You wait for the one thing that will change your life, make it more than it is— something wonderful, exceptional, stones awakening, depths opening to you. In the dusky bookstalls old books glimmer gold and brown. You think of lands you journeyed through, of paintings and a dress once worn by a woman you never found again. And suddenly you know: that was enough. You rise and there appears before you in all its longings and hesitations the shape of what you lived.

And these Things, which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient, they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all. They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart, within - oh endlessly - within us! Whoever we may be at last. Earth, isn't this what you want: to arise within us, invisible? Isn't it your dream to be wholly invisible someday?

confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you.

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.

I know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has needed me. My looking ripens things ? Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

Because he loves only as man, not as human being, there is in his sexual feelings something narrow, seemingly wild, malicious, temporal, finite, which weakens his art and makes it equivocal and dubious.

We are the driven ones. But the march of time Is but a trifle In our perpetual enduring. All this hastening Will soon be done; For only lingering Can consecrate our being. Young men, don't throw Your energies into tests of Speed or aerial flight. Know that all is in repose: The darkness, the brilliantly luminous, The flower, the book

Da gibt es kein Messen mit der Zeit, da gilt kein Jahr, und zehn Jahre sind nichts, Künstler sein heißt: nicht rechnen und zählen; reifen wie der Baum, der seine Säfte nicht drängt und getrost in den Stürmen des Frühlings steht ohne die Angst, daß dahinter kein Sommer kommen könnte. [...] Geduld ist alles!