Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

To love is also good, for love is hard. Love berween one person and another: that is perhaps the hardest thing it is laid on us to do, the utmost, the ultimate trial and test, the work for which all other work is just preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, do not yet know how to love: they must learn. With their whole being, with all their strength, concerted on their solitary fearful, upward beating hearts, they have to learn to love.

Eines Tages wird das Mädchen da sein und die Frau, deren Name nicht mehr nur einen Gegensatz zum Männlichen bedeuten wird, sondern etwas für sich, etwas, wobei man keine Ergänzung und Grenze denkt, nur an Leben und Dasein - der weibliche Mensch. Dieser Fortschritt wird das Liebe-Erleben, das jetzt voll Irrung ist (...), verwandeln, von Grund aus verändern, zu einer Beziehung umbilden, die von Mensch zu Mensch gemeint ist, nicht mehr von Mann zu Weib.

Live the questions now. Perhaps you then may gradually, without noticing, one day in the future, live into the answers.

One must never despair upon losing something, whether it's an individual or an experience of joy or happiness; everything returns even more magnificently. (Letters on Life)

No constellation is as steadfast, no accomplishment as irrevocable as a connection between human beings which, at the very moment it becomes visible, works more forcefully in those invisible depths where our existence is as lasting as gold lodged in stone, more constant than a star.

You are looking outward, which, now above all, you should not do. No one can advise and assist you, no one. There is only one way: go into yourself.

How we waste our afflictions! We study them, stare out beyond them into bleak continuance, hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas they're really our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one of the seasons of the clandestine year -- ; not only a season --: they're site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.

Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. 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.

Os filósofos deveriam ser pacientes e esperar, e não querer fundar uma soberania, nem um reino que se mantenha com os meios do seu tempo. Eles são os reis do vindouro, e as suas coroas ainda são unas com os minérios que enchem as veias das montanhas...

I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life.

Do not observe yourself too much. Do not draw too hasty conclusions from what happens to you; just let it happen. Otherwise, you start to look accusingly (that is, morally) upon your past, which is naturally involved in everything you now encounter. But whatever part of the errors, wishes, and desires of your boyhood is working in you, that is not what you remember and condemn.

Aprendo a ver. No sé por qué, todo penetra en mí más profundamente, y no permanece donde, hasta ahora, todo terminaba siempre. Tengo un interior que ignoraba. Así es desde ahora. No sé lo que pasa.

Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie von weit, als welkten in den Himmeln ferne Gärten; sie fallen mit verneinender Gebärde. Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit. Wir alle fallen. Diese Hand da fällt. Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen. Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions

He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog.

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.

Most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

Who has not sat, afraid, before his own heart's curtain?

Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House.Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window,—possibly: Pillar, Tower?

The most visible joy can only reveal itself to us when we've transformed it, within.

Love your solitude and bear with sweet-sounding lamentation the suffering it causes you.

Beauty's nothingbut beginning of Terror we're still just able to bear,and why we adore it so is because it serenelydisdains to destroy us. Each single angel is terrible.

Death is the side of life which is turned away from us.