Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded.

It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words.

Don't take my devils away, because my angels may flee too.

You have had many and great sadnesses, which passed. And you say that even this passing was hard for you and put you out of sorts. But, please, consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change when you were sad?

You, darkness, of whom I am born- I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes the rest.

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.

Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.

Do not allow yourself to be misled by the surfaces of things.

There is only one journey. Going inside yourself.

Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.

Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy of being No-one's sleep under so many lids.

What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours—that is what you must be able to attain.

And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure.

Whoever you are: in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything; yours is the last house before the far-off: whoever you are. With your eyes, which in their weariness barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold, you lift very slowly one black tree and place it against the sky: slender, alone. And you have made the world. And it is huge and like a word which grows ripe in silence. And as your will seizes on its meaning, tenderly your eyes let it go...

There are a large number of people in the room, but one is unaware of them. They are in the books. At times they move among the pages, like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future lessens . . . . Superabundant existence wells in my heart.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsay able than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you going and coming and often staying all night.)…

A kind of memory that tells us that what we're now striving for was once nearer and truer and attached to us with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, there it was breath. After the first home the second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.

I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.

Try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live with them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now.