Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.

It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.

Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.

There are so many things about which some old man ought to tell one while one is little; for when one is grown one would know them as a matter of course.

Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.

Fame — the aggregate of all the misunderstandings that collect around a new name.

If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing . . . then you are a writer.

And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

Draw near to Nature. Then try like some first human being to say what you see and experience and love and lose.

Speaking of August Rodin: He raised his world above us in an immense arc, and made it a part of nature.

Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart.

All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.

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

May you find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith.

I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!

I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

All things want to float.