Quotes from Rainer Maria Rilke

For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

Put out my eyes, and I can see you still; slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet; and without any feet can go to you; and tongueless, I can conjure you at will. Break off my arms, I shall take hold of you and grasp you with my heart as with a hand; arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true; and if you set this brain of mine afire, upon my blood I then will carry you.

You are nearing the land that is life; you will recognize it by its seriousness.

Be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again;

Your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance.

Often when I imagine you, your wholeness cascades into many shapes. You run like a herd of luminous deer, and I am dark; I am forest.

Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.

We make our way through Everything like thread passing through fabric, giving shape to images that we ourselves do not know.

Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again. But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the earth, seems irrevocable.

That is fundamentally the only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things that can befall us

There is time only to work slowly There is no time not to love

I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of. Everything passes into it now. I don't know what happens there.

And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Someday you will name me, then gently place those burning holy roses in my hair. [Songs of Longing]

Then suddenly you're left all alone with your body that can't love you and your will that can't save you.

I am a house gutted by fire where only the guilty sometimes sleep before the punishment that devours them hounds them out in the open.

And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

Oh hours of childhood, when behind each shape more than the past appeared and what streamed out before us was not the future. We felt our bodies growing and were at times impatient to be grown up, half for the sake of those with nothing left but their grownupness.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Perhaps all dragons in our lives are really princesses just waiting to see us just once being beautiful and courageous.

A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude.

All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.