Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

Tudo quanto é velocidade não será mais do que passado, porque só aquilo que demora nos inicia.

If two people managed not to get stuck in hatred during their honest struggles with each other, that is, in the edges of their passion that became ragged and sharp when it cooled and set, if they could stay fluid, active, flexible, and changeable in all of their interactions and relations, and, in a word, if a mutually human and friendly consideration remained available to them, then their decision to separate cannot easily conjure disaster and terror.

Through love and through death, our innate ability to transform the loss of control is activated to bring forth a deeper awareness of life.

One has to be able at every moment to place one's hand on the earth like the first human being.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves...

Und dann und wann ein Weiser Elephant

in later years it occasionally happened that I awoke in the night and the stars were so real and advanced so convincingly that I could not understand how people managed to lose so much of the world

Doch wie ich mich auch in mich selber neige: Mein Gott ist dunkel und wie ein Gewebe von hundert Wurzeln, welche schweigsam trinken.

to go into yourself and to examine the depths from which your life springs; at its source you will find the answer to the question

You are so young, all still lies ahead of you, and I should like to ask you, as best I can, dear Sir, to be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue.

just like the moon, life surely has a side that is perpetually turned away from us and which is not its opposite but adds to its perfection and completeness, to the truly intact and full sphere of being.

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.

Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.

Is it not peculiar that nearly all of the great philosophers and psychologists have always paid attention to the earth and nothing but the earth? Would it not be more sublime to lift our eyes from this crumb, and instead of considering a speck of dust in the universe, to turn our attention to space itself?

This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us.

Stiller Freund der vielen Fernen, fühle, wie dein Atem noch den Raum vermehrt.

But if they, the infinitely dead, were awakening an image within us, see, they would perhaps point to the catkins hanging from the bare hazels, or mean the rain pelting the dark earth in spring.— And we, who think of happiness as rising, would feel an emotion that almost startles when a happy thing falls.

The more one is, the more abundant is everything one experiences. If you want to have a deep love in your life, you must save up for it and collect and gather honey.

Weltinnenraum," "world-inner-space". It is most often used to speak that essential space within the heart of a human being.

People have tended to resolve everything in the direction of easiness, of the light and on the lightest side of the light; but it is clear that we must hold to the heavy, the difficult.

I am able more and more to make use of that long patience you have taught me by your tenacious example; that patience which, disproportionate to ordinary life which seems to bid us haste, puts us in touch with all that surpasses us.

Im Schwierigen liegen die freundlichen Kräfte, die Hände, die an uns arbeiten.

Je mehr Liebe man gibt, desto mehr besitzt man davon.

Never forget to make a wish, Malte. You should never give up wishing. I believe there is no such thing as fulfillment, but there are wishes, and they go on lasting, your whole lifetime, so that you couldn't wait long enough for them to be fulfilled even if you wanted to.