Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

In writing poetry, one is always aided and even carried away by the rhythm of exterior things: for the lyric cadence is that of nature: of the waters, the wind, the night. But 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.

I circle for millennia, around God, around the ancient tower,    and still do not know: am I hawk, a storm, or a great song?

perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys

Und der Künstler ist immer noch dieser: ein Tänzer, dessen Bewegung sich bricht an dem Zwang seiner Zelle. Was in seinen Schritten und dem beschrankten Schwung seiner Arme nicht Raum hat, kommt in der Ermattung von seinen Lippen, oder er muß die noch ungelebten Linien seines Leibes mit wunden Fingern in die Wände ritzen.

Accetta dunque [...] un bacio con tutto il cuore nella solenne ora di Natale, la più pacata dell'anno, la più misteriosa, in cui i desideri ancora ignari si tendono fino all'estremo e vengono per prodigio esauditi: [...] abbandona ogni dubbio e incomprensione: in quest'ora abbiamo un posticino dentro di noi dove siamo semplicemente bambini, che attende e sta là, fiducioso e mai confuso, nel suo diritto a una grande gioia: questo è il Natale.

Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you. (Letters on Life)

So whoever loves must try to act as if he had a great work: he must be much alone and go into himself and collect himself and hold fast to himself; he must work; he must become something!

ghost of a distant author, with the disturbing presence of the foreign text, and with the phantom of the reader.

I believe in old age; to work and to grow old: this is what life expects of us. And then one day to be old and still be quite far from understanding everything - no, but to begin, but to love, but to suspect, but to be connected to what is remote and inexpressible, all the way up into the stars. (Letters on Life)

I believe that love remains so strong and powerful in your memory because it was your first deep experience of solitariness and the first inner work that you undertook on your life.

Not wooing, no longer shall wooing, voice that has outgrown it be the nature of your cry; but instead, you would cry out as purely as a bird when the quickly ascending season lifts him up, nearly forgetting that he is a suffering creature and not just a single heart being flung into brightness, into the intimate skies.

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.

It should either have passed away with my childhood, or my childhood should have flowed away from it later, leaving it behind, real among all the rest of reality, something to see and objectively tell, like a thing in Cezanne, incomprehensible for all I care, but tangible.

If you hold close to nature, to what is simple in it, to the small things people hardly see and which all of a sudden can become great and immeasurable; if you have this love for what is slight, and quite unassumingly, as a servant, seek to win the confidence of what seems poor – then everything will grow easier, more unified and somehow more conciliatory, not perhaps in the intellect, which, amazed, remains a step behind, but in your deepest consciousness, watchfulness and knowledge.

In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive and lend it grandeur and height.

Deep, calm, siren-like, and magical. -Two Poems to Hans Thomas on his Sixtieth Birthday

You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you — no one

But everything that we encounter is so very much of one piece, and so intimately related to everything else, and has given birth to itself, grows, and is then raised so much to come into its own, that we basically just need to be there, if only unassumingly, if only authentically, the way the earth is there in its affirmation of the seasons, light and dark and wholly in space, longing to be supported by nothing but that web of influences and forces where the stars feel secure.

Do not believe that the person who is trying to offer you solace lives his life effortlessly among the simple and quiet words that might occasionally comfort you. His life is filled with much hardship and sadness, and it remains far behind yours. But if it were otherwise, he could never have found these words.

Basically, if it is good, one can't live to see it recognized: otherwise it's just half good and not reckless enough...

And more than that: you are also the doctor responsible for looking after himself. But with all illnesses there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait.

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.

Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to write; check whether it reaches its roots into the deepest region of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied you to write. This above all: ask yourself in your night's quietest hour: must I write?

Even on days when fate wishes to bestow boundless gifts on them, most people make mistakes in accepting: they don't accept straightforwardly and consequently lose something while doing so, they take with a secondary purpose in mind, or they accept what is given to them as if they were being compensated for something else.