Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

Aber das Wehende höre, die ununterbrochene Nachricht, die aus Stille sich bildet.

Life is right, in any case.

You, most lonely, most remote: how they have appropriated you for your fame. How long ago was it that they were bitterly against you, and now they embrace you as one of their own. And they carry your words around with them in the cages of their darkness and trot them out in public squares and poke them a little from within their sense of security. All your terrible beasts of prey.

And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Don't write love poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the hardest to work with, and it takes great, fully ripened power to create something individual where good, even glorious, traditions exist in abundance.

But they are difficult things with which we have been charged; almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.

Bodily delight is a sense experience, just like pure seeing or the pure feeling with which a lovely fruit fills the tongue; it is a great boundless experience which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the splendour of all knowing. Our acceptance of it is not bad; what is bad is that almost all men misuse and squander this experience, and apply it as a stimulus to the weary places of their life, a dissipation instead of a rallying for the heights.

If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little past the far reaches of our foresight, perhaps we would endure our sorrows with greater trust than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown;

I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false.

Ein Mal jedes, nur ein Mal. Ein Mal und nicht mehr. Und wir auch ein Mal. Nie wieder. Aber dieses ein Mal gewesen zu sein, wenn auch nur ein Mal: irdisch gewesen zu sein, scheint nicht widerrufbar.

das flüchtet... und sein Bangen ist groß, daß ihr es selber / wie schlank es entschwindet/ nach vielem Traurigsein erst wiederfindet, noch immer schreckhaft, warm und atemlos.

Si hubiera consciencia como la nuestra en el seguro animal que viene a nuestro encuentro en otra dirección, nos cogería violentamente y nos haría dar la vuelta con su cambio. Pero su ser es para él infinito, suelto y no mira a su estado, puro como su mirada hacia adelante. Y donde nosotros vemos futuro, allí ve él Todo y a sí mismo en Todo y a salvo para siempre.

I want everything quiet and simple. For me: walking barefoot, sitting still, reading, listening to stories and now and then telling some myself. Eating fruit, drinking milk, longing to create, but with patience and many insights.

Sein Sinn ist Zwiespalt. An der Kreuzung zweier Herzwege steht kein Tempel für Apoll.

Sometimes a man rises from the supper table and goes outside. And he keeps on going because somewhere to the east there's a church.

Çünkü mutludur, kendilerinden uzaklaÅŸmam?? olanlar sessizce, çat?s?z, yaÄŸmurun alt?nda duranlar

await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life: in understanding as in creating.

To understand our being here as one side of being in its entirety and to exhaust it passionately, this would be the demand placed on us by death; while life, as long as one truly admits it, is in every spot all of life.

Summer might come after. It does come. But it comes only to the patient ones, who are there as if eternity lay in front of them.

So much has been written (both well and poorly) about things that the things themselves no longer hold an opinion but appear only to mark the imaginary point of intersection for certain clever theories. Whoever wants to say anything about them speaks in reality only about the views of his predecessors and lapses into a semipolemical spirit that stands in exact opposition to the naïve productive spirit with which each object wants to be grasped and understood.

A piece of art is good if it is born of necessity. This, its source, is its criterion; there is no other.

Illness is the means by which an organism sheds what is foreign to it; all that needs to be done is to assist it in being sick, to have the complete illness, and then to escape from it, for that constitutes its progress.

You are not too old And it is not too late . . .

Pietà Fills now my cup, and past thought is my fulness thereof. I harden as a stone sets hard at its heart. Hard that I am, I know this alone: that thou didst grow— — — — — — and grow, to outgrow, as too great pain, my heart's reach utterly. Now liest thou my womb athwart, now can I not to thee again give birth.